Why Do We Celebrate Valentine’s Day?
Since the birth of our modern civilisation, February has always been the Month of love thanks to the 14th day of February (Valentine’s Day). On that day, love fills the air, people share gifts with their loved ones, children and teenagers confess to their crushes, and romance takes over the internet (at least for a few days). I have always found Valentine’s Day to be rather pointless. Even as a child, the idea of choosing a single day to celebrate love just felt silly to me. Shouldn’t we show and celebrate love every single day?
Today, as a card-carrying member of the Global Fellowship of Single People, I want to look through history to discover why Valentine’s Day even exists and why the world collectively chose to celebrate love on the 14th of February.
Where Does the Name “Valentine” come from?
The popular story we all know comes from the legend of Saint Valentine. During the third century in Rome, there was a priest named Valentine. When Emperor Claudius II decided to use single men to bolster his armies instead of those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine rebelled against the emperor’s orders and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret.
When Valentine’s actions were eventually discovered, Claudius ordered his execution and Valentine was killed on the 14th of February. According to further extensions of the legend, before his execution, Valentine sent the first “Valentine” letter himself after he fell in love with a young girl — possibly his jailor’s daughter — who visited him during his confinement. it is alleged that he wrote her a letter signed “From your Valentine,” an expression that is still in use today.
Here’s the shocker about the legend of Saint Valentine: It’s a legend. This means that there’s no actual historical proof of the story. His story is almost no different from myths of characters like Hercules, Zeus, or Thor. However, there’s proof that the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred around the same time. We can assume that somehow, the day was namd after one of them but the stories of their lives have been lost to time.
Why was Valentine’s Day Created?
While some believe Valentine’s Day was created in honour of the death of Saint Valentine’s, others believe this was just a smoke screen to christianise a Pagan celebration called Lupercalia. This is not hard to believe as Christianity at the time had a habit of transforming pagan holidays into Christian ones to appeal to the massive number of new converts from pagan cultures. This practice formed the basis for our current-day traditions like Christmas, Halloween, and even Easter.
Lupercalia, also known as Dies Februatus (the origin of the name February) was an annual tradition done to honour Lupercus, a god of fertility in sheep and protector of flocks. I wouldn’t want to get into the details of the rituals carried out during Lupercalia but there was one that struck me. Apparently, after sacrificing animals to the god, men would wear the skins of the animals (to mirror the appearance of Lupercus) and use strips of animal skin to whip passersby. This sounds similar to a specific tradition in different Nigerian cultures where men masquerade as spirits and go around flogging passersby. It’s a marvel to see similar traditions in cultures separated by geography and time.
Back to Valentine’s Day, the belief that Valentine’s Day was just Lupercalia rebranded stems from a few circumstantial evidence: Outside of the Christian track record of rebranding Pagan traditions, the timeline between the last Lupercalia celebration and the first mention of a Saint Valentine’s Day is very close (the 5th Century). Also, the Pope at the time, Gelasius, was recorded to have deeply despised Pagan traditions, especially Lupercalia and the official date for Lupercalia at the time was the 15th of February.
How did Valentine’s Day turn into a Celebration of Love?
From the 5th to the 13th Century, there is no historical evidence that Valentine’s Day was a celebration of love. This would all change with the English Poet Geoffrey Chaucer who published a poem in 1382 called “Parliament of Foules”. He found that birds did their mating around the 14th of February every year and created a 699-line poem that described a conference of birds that meet to choose their mates on St. Valentine’s Day. He used it as a device to poke fun at the traditions of courtship at that time.
For this was on Saint Valentine’s day,
When every fowl comes there his mate to take,
Of every species that men know, I say,
And then so huge a crowd did they make,
That earth and sea, and tree, and every lake
Was so full, that there was scarcely space
For me to stand, so full was all the place.
As the poem grew in popularity, European nobility started sending love notes during bird mating season. However, this was still just a niche thing done by the rich people of that time. They were the only ones who could afford to dedicate an entire day to love. Common folk were more likely to be hustling for their literal daily bread.
Valentine’s Day would not be historically referenced again until the 1600s in a little-known play called Hamlet by an artist named William Shakespeare. In the 5th scene of Act 4, Hamlet’s potential wife Ophelia sings a song:
Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s Day,
Early in the morning
A maid came to his window
To be his Valentine.
He got up, put on his clothes,
And opened the bedroom door,
He let in the maid, but she wasn’t a maid
When she departed.
By this time, history shows that the traditions of our current Valentine’s Day had begun to form. The song referenced a then-belief that the first woman a man sees on the morning of Valentine’s Day was her true love. This is further proven by Samuel Pepys, a 17th-century high-ranking English Navy Official whose diary spoke about Valentine’s Day practices such as feasting, flirting with your valentine, and giving gifts and letters to fair maidens.
How did we get to the current version of Valentine’s Day?
I have one word for you: Capitalism. By the 16th Century, the practices that would become commonplace today were already popular. However, the Industrial Revolution brought Valentine’s Day to the common man. Around the mid-1800s, it was still common for Valentine’s letters to be handmade. This was a costly and time-intensive activity for the average man. Technology made it easier and cheaper to mass-produce paper and by extension, Valentine letters. As printing technology improved, simple and handwritten letters became elaborately designed cards. Over time, Valentine’s Day spread to the United States. In 1913, Hallmark started mass-producing Valentine's cards in the country. Yes, that same Hallmark that makes the cheesy romance and Christmas movies.
After the 2nd world war, the rise of consumerism sent the valentine industry into overdrive. This is when Valentine’s Day truly achieved its current form. Thanks to Colonialism and globalisation, these traditions slowly spread around the world and different cultures added and tweaked them to suit their tastes.
Today, Valentine’s Day is a multi-billion dollar industry. In 2023, Valentine’s Day Spending was Expected To Hit $26 Billion, One Of The Highest On Record. This was just within the United States and spending in 2024 is expected to exceed the previous year.
It’s very intriguing that for something so universally celebrated, we can’t definitively trace the origins of Valentine’s Day. However, what we can definitively say is that the day has become another means for people to send money on things they don’t need. As much as I was cynical going into writing this article, I was hoping to find something romantic about the origin of the day but what I found was a crisscross of lost history, rebranded traditions and socioeconomic evolution.
In the end, I still hold my initial thoughts about Valentine’s Day: Why dedicate one day to love when you can choose to dedicate every day to it? As you spend the 14th of February giving gifts to and showering your “Valentine” with love, just know that nothing is stopping you from doing the same thing on the 15th of February.
If you want to learn more about the weird history of Valentine’s Day, I would urge you to watch The Messed Up Origins™ of Valentine’s Day, a YouTube video by Jon Solo. It helped me find a lot of reference points for this article.