Well, Mrs. Turner asked a good one regarding your current temporal location of Valentine’s Day. So what’s love got to do with it? Not much at all – unless you equate lustful festivals of the past or presents and grand gestures of today with love, all overseen by a gentle hand of a hopeless romantic (now) sanctified for his martyrdom.

This does not diminish the love you feel for people in your life, but just serves as a reminder that love is celebrated every day, even when your hair is a mess, when you’re tired and no one is taking you out to a candle lit dinner, but is in fact checking that mole on your back while you’re discussing who’s going to vacuum later.

What you know now as Valentine’s Day is a first Christian and then commercial rebranding of the “pagan” festival of Lupercalia, celebrating the fertility god Lupercus aka Faunus. Lupercus was honored by drunken orgies and fertility rights, bloody rituals and sacrifices as well as an eeny, meeny, miny, moe random pairing of young people. The festival was held on 15th of February. To “enhance fertility” the Romans would sacrifice goats and a dog, smear the blood on two young men and wipe it off with wool dipped in milk only to have them, clothed only by the goatskin around their loins, running through the town striking woman with goatskin strips – if you were pregnant this would mean easier labor and it would make infertile women fertile.

Lupercalia was not original by itself but was a Roman rebranding of the Greek festival of Arcadian Lykaia and the worship of Pan, who can in its iconology be traced to the sun god Ba’al. How did we get to the re-appropriation of the dates and ideas to fit into more sensitive and disgust prone sensibilities of the contemporary couple. Well, the Roman emperor Claudius II realized that too many young men were dodging the army draft by getting married, because only single men could be soldiers, so implemented a simple solution – he banned marriage. Not very far sighted from him in the long run, but selfish enough to remedy the situation at hand. There was a Roman priest who converted to Christianity named Valentinus of Terni who married Christian couples in secret. For this he was subsequently imprisoned, tortured and beheaded on Feb 14th 269 A.D.. He become a martyr and the patron of true love and marriages. So when the roman Empire fell and the Holy Roman Empire arose on Christian fundaments, the openly lascivious and lustful shenanigans of Lupercalia were unacceptable and in the 5th cent. A.D. Feb 14th was named a holiday dedicated to Valentinus. It was much easier to retain the new converts to Christianity by not banning their previous traditions, just repackaging and assimilating them.

How about the hearts, red roses and the chubby cherub like baby Cupid floating around making you quiver with its quiver full of arrows? Well Venus was a goddess of love, beauty, fertility and sexual immorality, the Roman equivalent to the Greek Aphrodite. She is the mother of Cupid and her favorite flower was the red rose.

Does any of this matter for the you who has love to give and who feels loved and appreciated, secure and heard, the you who knows the distinction between love and possession, between the “you must make me happy” and ” I want you to be happy”? No, not at all. It is trivia that falls under the “fun fact” category of imaginary stories that become customs only due to collective consensus of cultural flows and our innate need for stability and rituals. So love. Love so deeply and clean that you have no need to own, be right or expecting anything in return. Love gently and kindly, coming into love as a full individual that doesn’t need to be co-dependently completed…. And don’t promise forever, but that you’re gonna try even when it is hard. There is no “forever” and “try” is the next best thing. We love you all here each day as an extended digital family, we really do. Happy Valentine’s Day!