Clementine Jepsen
Illustration by Clementine Jepsen
Love fills the air every February as romantics gather. Vibrant roses, boxes of chocolates, and romantic candle-lit dinners: all are trademarks of Valentine’s Day, the Holiday of Love. With Valentine’s Day’s overwhelming theme of relationships, it’s interesting to know the origins derive from a less than romantic means.
Before the conceptualization of “romance”, man and woman only came together for future benefits, such as fortune and family relationship through marriage. However, with popular medieval stories of devotion and noble deeds for partners, romance would flourish as people began to confess their love with: letters of the most intimate thoughts, food, an especially valuable resource in the Middle Ages, and roses, the favorite flower of Goddess of Love Venus. These gifts would not only display the ability to provide for a lover and family, but they’d show the commitment and passion one had for their significant other.
Continuing with a love story, Saint Valentine, Roman priest and firm believer of love, lived in Rome under the rule of Emperor Claudius II, a feared and respected leader, who banned marriage believing commitment weakened the mentality of his soldiers. Valentine retaliated against the Emperor’s will, continuing to perform marriages for young lovers in private, but caused the Emperor to storm Valentine’s Catholic church and send him on the road to execution. Before the priest’s inevitable demise, he’d fallen into deep love with the jailor’s beautiful daughter too, in which his last letter to her signed “From Your Valentine,” the iconic phrase of the holiday we now celebrate and the last words of the rebellious Roman hero.
The origins of Valentine’s Day derive from a massive variety of time periods and places, proving the universal language in the world is love.