From beheadings to divine love: the bloody history of Valentine’s Day
💖 Hello to everyone who, like me, will be spending tonight in bed watching Love is Blind, the most important anthropological study of our time.
Issue #268: herds, heroes’ journeys, and lonely mouths
By Adeline Dimond
Happy Valentine’s Day, a holiday that allegedly originated (sorry to break it to you) with the horrific deaths of two priests. Both were named Valentinus, both made some powerful Romans mad, and both were brutally murdered on February 14.
The details are murky, but it seems that in the third century AD, the first Valentinus secretly married young couples in the Catholic church, even though Roman Emperor Claudius II had prohibited marriage. (He thought unmarried soldiers fought better). Valentinus later cured an official’s daughter’s blindness and the official was so grateful he asked to be baptized. This was simply a bridge too far for Claudius, who ordered Valentinus to be beaten and beheaded. No good deed, etc.
About seventy years later, history repeated itself: another Valentinus traveled to Rome to cure a kid who had his head stuck between his knees. (IDK either but that’s what the Vatican says happened). As a show of appreciation, the kid’s family and the son of Placidus, the prefect of Rome, converted to Catholicism. Placidus was furious and in a deeply unoriginal move, he had this Valentinus beheaded, too.
If you’re wondering how we got from beheadings to sending each other 58 million pounds of chocolate, blame the poets. Specifically, blame Chaucer and his poem “Parliament of Fowls,”in which a group of birds chooses mates on February 14, St. Valentine’s Day. Some scholars believe the poem is about the protracted marriage negotiations between Richard II and Anne of Bohemia. They did finally get married, and when Anne died, Richard was so grief-stricken he demolished their palace. Maybe something is wrong with me, but I find this romantic.
But is that type of irrational love normal? In The Young Lady’s Guide to Spinsterhood social scientist James Horton, Ph.D walks us through American attitudes about love. We’ve gone through a few cycles: Until the 1800s, love was informed by agrarian needs. Sure, you should marry someone you like, but the more important question was whether your man could run a farm. You would grow to love each other eventually.
The second phase, starting in the early 1800s, flipped the script: falling in love before marriage was the ultimate ideal, but it couldn’t be just any kind of love. It had to be pure, it had to be divine. It had to be proof of God’s will. Single women surveyed during the “age of romantic love” — which was in full force by 1850 — remained single, Horton writes, not because they were unattractive, but because they couldn’t find a partner that made them feel like God was onboard. Simply put, if it “wasn’t divine, it wasn’t worth pursuing.”
The third phase started around 1960, and emphasized partnerships between two equals who help one another become the best versions of themselves. But do you need a partner to do that? According to Michele L Kilpatrick, a strategic consultant for grassroots organizations, the answer is no. In a piece from the Medium archive, she recounts a realization she had when working in D.C. while her boyfriend remained in New York: she was having more fun without him. This moved her to reflect on her habit of minimizing herself to fit into a feminine “marriageable” ideal. When she stopped doing that and became single, she was finally free to be fully herself.
Or as another poet, Warsan Shire writes in Thirty-Four Reasons We Failed at Love, “I belong deeply to myself. ”
🐑 What else we’re reading
- In My Expulsion from the Herd, author and copyeditor Niall Stewart processes the psychological pain of being fired as the editor of Oxford University’s student newspaper. “Expulsion,” Steward writes, “offends our basic human need to belong, and avoiding expulsion is programmed into our DNA. It’s an in-built defense mechanism to keep us alive.”
- I loved (and needed) this reminder from Jason McBride that “[t]he only way to experience …the hero’s triumph is to leave on the hero’s journey.” In other words: get lost and start wandering. (The illustrations are beautiful too).
🍿 Your daily dose of practical wisdom
This piece by Kaki Okumura about “kuchisabishii,” or “lonely mouth” in Japanese, makes me feel better about my habit of dipping baby cucumbers into a bowl of blue cheese dressing while I watch reality television. The cure for mindless eating, Okamura explains, is not to force yourself to stop, but rather to give yourself a bit of empathy: simply acknowledge that you are human, pop that last snack in your mouth and move on.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb, Harris Sockel, & Carly Rose Gillis
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