It is that time of year once again and you are doing one of two things — frantically making dinner arrangements and buying gifts for your significant other or preparing for a night of Netflix and ice cream. The contemporary Valentine’s Day is wholly based upon whether or not you have a boyfriend or girlfriend to spend time with. The day is all about romance. However, this was not always the case.
In the third century there lived a man in Rome named Valentine later sainted by the Catholic church. Legend has it he would wear an amethyst ring to signify he would secretly marry young soldiers against the edict of the emperor. When interrogated and thrown in jail for his defense of Christian, monogamous marriage, he healed the daughter of the jailer of her blindness and, soon before he was to be executed, he wrote a note to that daughter signed “from your Valentine.” While the Roman Emperor Diocletian likely burned the true accounts of Saint Valentine’s life, we still glean the ideal of sacrifice from this legend. St. Valentine spent his life trying to make others happy even in the face of death. In memory of this life, the Christian Church in later centuries established Valentine’s day as a day to remember his martyrdom. No connection to romance existed until Chaucer wrote a poem with a line associating the day with the mating season of birds.
We have lost the meaning of true love. Due to the nature of commercialization and societal expectancy for fulfilling material needs, we have even gone past the romance into an un-empathetic divergence of realities. Either you stress yourself over making everything just perfect for your significant other or you are begrudgingly reminded that you do not have one. The end result is the same — lovelessness.
Saint Valentine would be ashamed of the association with the holiday his memorial has become. He gave his life for people that he loved, not in a romantic way, but rather with agápe love — charitable sacrifice for the betterment of others. His mission was to honor marriage among the youth and encourage them in steadfastness and commitment to the love they had just begun to foster, not buy chocolates or a fancy dinner to placate an argument with the expectation of more intimacy later.
I exhort everyone reading this, regardless of your relationship status, to give rather than buy. Show love to others. Whether it be friendly love, philanthropic love, familial love or romantic love, make yourself a vessel for love to flow through. Write a card to your long-lost friend, give a homeless person your meal, go the extra mile in your chores for your family, or surprise your significant other with a trip to the beach to watch the sunset. No matter what you choose this Saturday, use it as an opportunity to honor a man who honored God by loving others and making sure their love was successful.
