In the Name of Love

Last February I wrote a Valentine’s Day based blog because I was acutely aware of the existence of the day. Well this year I still am for much the same reason (woo, 14 and a half months), so this week I interrupt the recent stream of political outrage (Mubarak has resigned by the way, so congrats to Egypt) to ramble on about love, Valentine’s Day and probably some other stuff – I don’t exactly plan these most of the time.

Of course the build up to Valentine’s Day is plagued by exactly the same dichotomy of idiocy and self-righteousness as any other holiday (especially Christmas). As soon as the Christmas decorations have been taken from the shelves and the festive gifts have been flogged off in the post Christmas sales, they’re replaced by an assortment of teddy bears, love hearts and chocolate, all of which seems legally obliged to contain some red or, even more insidiously, pink. Restaurants scream at us to book up our table for the big day, and rose gardeners sweat over how they’re going to produce enough roses to go round.

Meanwhile all the people who ranted and raved (not without cause) about the commercialisation of Christmas get back on their high-horses, and rant and rave (still not without cause) about the commercialisation of Love. These rants are sometimes made all the more bitter by the loneliness that underpins them – some people just won’t let others have fun unless they’re having fun as well.

The problem with a lot of these protestations is that they claim that there’s no need to have a Valentine’s Day at all. They argue that the whole endeavour is just a pointless gimmick for people who aren’t really in love because they shouldn’t need a special day to show that they’re in love. It may well be the case that most of the dinners, roses, chocolates, teddies and red purchased on Monday (and in the past month) will be in vain, and indeed there’s a good chance that a lot of that money will have been spent purely for the intention of getting laid, in which case one wonders if a hooker might not have been cheaper. However that is not to say that all of the people who are honouring the Patron Saint of love (and plagues, no I’ve not forgotten that one) are fools who have been swept up in the romanticism that is encouraged by commercialism.

That is also not to say that there isn’t a real problem when you walk into Carlton’s and can see nothing but the colour red from the first week in January. The fact that most high streets promote the fantasy that spending money on roses and chocolate will make your relationship work is depressing. It is more depressing that popular culture promotes the insane ideals of romantic love that imply that love does come at first sight, that she is the one and that Mr Right will stroll easily into your life at some point and sweep you off your feet.

Relationships require effort. Love doesn’t just arrive on a platter, it requires work. True love doesn’t spring fully fledged from acquaintance and all the roses in the world will never change that. Relationships develop from simply acquaintances, through friendship and into love. That development needs to be nourished and worked on. The trust and respect that love requires is something that need to be built with time and dedication, not bought with flowers and chocolate.

Flowers and chocolate are tokens. They’re the things you buy the person you love because you love them, not because you hope that showering them with gifts will make them love you. They are the effect of the effort, the time and the dedication that a relationship takes, not an alternative. Relationships cannot be sustained on flowers and chocolate, nor can they be built with flowers and chocolate.

This is where Valentine’s Day has gone wrong. The concept itself is not inherently unreasonable, but the way in which it had evolved has made it into a farce. Valentine’s Day has become a day where love is celebrated for its outward expressions, such as the giving of gifts, and that which creates that expression is gleefully ignored. It encourages us to replicate the effects without creating the cause. It creates the misconception that we can woo that person who we see in the coffee shop but never talk to, or that we can get the co-worker who doesn’t even see we’re there to fall in love with us, with nothing more than a token, an empty gesture; a bribe.

Love does not take bribes. Love cannot be forced and it cannot be invented. Love is born of respect for the virtues of another and nurtured by the desire for that person to be happy. When we allow ourselves to be bribed by chocolate and roses, by a low cut top and a winning smile, we are exercising our lust, not our love.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with that. Experiencing pleasure with another person simply for the fun of it is fine, so long as this is not confused with having a relationship. To build a relationship on small tokens and mutual physical attraction is like constructing a house on foundations of sand; it might hold up for a while, but eventually everything will come tumbling down.

This damaging misconception is not just the fault of St Valentine. Indeed to blame it simply on the presence of Valentine’s Day would be to miss the point entirely. Popular culture expects, even demands, that the guy gets the girl and everything is ok in the end. Almost any Hollywood romance happens simply because the two characters happen to be of different genders so it’s simply assumed that they will fall in love. Through the film that usually seems to happen for no apparent reason and with no apparent stimulus. It’s just one of the many lies that Hollywood tells on a regular basis because that’s what sells.

Culture needs to get smarter. We could start with how we treat Valentine’s Day. There is a point to the day. Relationships take effort, and it’s sometimes hard for us to find the time to put that effort in. Life has a funny way of getting in the way of living, so we often neglect the ones we love. Love is such an important part of our lives that there really ought to be a day in which we’re expected to do something special for someone special, because they deserve it. We cannot shower loved ones in affection and flowers all the time, nor should we only do it for one day a year, but having a day where we should make an extra special attempt to show our love is no bad thing.

So if you’ve not planned to do anything on Monday for that special someone, then you might think about trying to change that, even if it’s just and email or a Facebook message. You won’t be joining the foolish hordes of people trying to use gifts as a pinch hitter for working at a relationship, because you now understand (if you didn’t before, which you probably did) that gifts are there to show love, not to create it. Sneer at the incarnadine gift shops and couples dining in gourmet restaurants all you like, but remember that Valentine’s Day is what you make it, so get out there and make that person feel special. St Valentine knows I intend to.

To all your lovers out there (lessons from History 4, valentine's day edition)

A cursory look at your calendar (and most shops) will inform you that Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. You might have noticed that last year I completely ignored this holiday, because back then I was bitter and alone. This year I’m bitter but slightly less alone so 14th February means something to me. Fortunately I have managed to suppress my awful soppiness about the holiday and actually done some research into the origins of this celebration of love and all things red (which basically means I googled it).

Anyway, 14th February is Saint Valentine’s Day, the patron saint of, inevitably, marriages, love, lovers, affianced couples, engaged couples and young people. However he is, rather bizarrely, also Patron Saint of bee keepers, epilepsy, fainting, greetings, plagues and travellers. Don’t ask me why. Saint Valentine, like all good saints, was a Roman Christian who was martyred for some crime or other. The problem is that there are at least three that know of. The one we know most about was imprisoned by Emperor Claudius II in the third Century AD for marrying young people. This seems like an innocuous enough offence, but it came after the Emperor had banned young people from marrying because he noticed that unmarried soldiers fought better (maybe they spent less time moping and more time raping and pillaging). He needed all the soldiers he could get because the Roman Empire was, as always, fighting almost everyone who bordered their territory and some who didn’t. Valentine soon realised that this was unjust and so went around marrying young Christians. Although he was imprisoned, he managed to make a good enough impression on Claudius that he was not executed, until he tried to convert him to Christianity, at which point he was promptly beaten with clubs, stoned and then beheaded.

It is reported, but not certain, that he, or one of the saints of that name, sent the first ‘Valentine’. Apparently he fell in love with the jailor’s daughters and sent her a note signed ‘From your Valentine’. Combined with the marrying of younger couples there is some ground for having the Saint be the patron of lovers, but it still seems pretty tenuous. The marrying (you’ll excuse metaphor) of Saint Valentine with a festival dedicated to love may have more to do with the date than anything else. February was seen, in the roman world at least, as the start of spring and hence fertility. The Roman festival Lupercalia happened on the Ides of February (the 15th) and was a celebration of fertility, a time for purification and an occasion for matchmaking, in a slightly more random way than that used today. It would be perhaps justifiably cynical to accuse the early church is simply hijacking a festival which already existed and repurpose it as a Christian festival; they did much the same for Christmas after all. Saint Valentine died in February, or at least one of them did, probably, so it made sense to make Saint Valentine the patron of love and make his Saint’s Day a celebration of love, marriage, couples and plague… no I still don’t know why that last one is even there.

So where does that leave us? A little more educated about the slightly haphazard and pretty incoherent history of what has become a painfully commercialised celebration of love, which millions of couples worldwide indulge in and have indulged in throughout history because they wanted an excuse to celebrate their relationship, and who can blame them.

Shame I wont be able to do the same because I leave for France in the morning for a very poorly timed family ski holiday, which is why this is uncharacteristically early and why next week will probably be a collection of holiday photos. I may change this slightly cop-out tradition because you get a photo from my life every day here anyway. I won’t be updating that at all next week for lack of internet (I expect) so I will do a massive update next Saturday.

Well I’m rambling now, so I hope all those couples out there have a wonderful Lupercalia and I hope all those singles out there can impress members of the opposite sex enough with knowledge of the origins of Valentine’s Day that they find someone to celebrate it with by next year.