Valentine's Day is more than idealized love
Perhaps we should also celebrate the friendship of a companion who helps us navigate the rough seas and enjoy the beauty of life.
Why do we celebrate Valentine’s Day? It originated as a Christian feast day honoring a martyr named Saint Valentine. There are multiple legends of Saint Valentine, and different reliquaries in the Czech Republic, Ireland, Scotland, England, and France all claim to have bones attributed to a Saint Valentine.
While Catholics believe that Feb. 14 commemorates the martyrdom of Saint Valentine, who was a Roman priest beheaded in the third century, no one can agree on exactly what he did or why he was executed. Some legends say Valentine was a bishop in Terni, Italy, who healed the sick, including the blind daughter of a prison guard whom he met while in jail for practicing Christianity in a pagan world. Others say the sentence came because he was caught secretly performing weddings, defying a ban on marriage that had been imposed by the Emperor as a solution to a military recruitment crunch.
The feast day’s earliest associations with love and fertility may have been inherited from the pagan festival of Lupercalia, which was celebrated by the ancient Romans between Feb. 13 and Feb. 15. A matchmaking lottery would pair men and women up for the duration of the festival, and the men would slap women with the hides of goats and dogs they had sacrificed, which was thought to make the women fertile.
Nowadays, Feb. 14 is a time to show appreciation for friends, families, significant others, and anyone else you might love. Traditional gifts include candy and flowers, particularly red roses, a symbol of beauty and love.
In summary, Valentine’s Day is the day of the year when lovers celebrate their love. Perhaps we should also celebrate the friendship of a companion who helps us navigate the rough seas and enjoy the beauty of life.
In 1941, author J.R.R. Tolkien discussed the illusion of idealized love and the value of companionship in a letter written to his son:
“There is in our Western culture the romantic chivalric tradition still strong…. It idealizes ‘love’ — and as far as it goes can be very good, since it takes in far more than physical pleasure, and enjoins if not purity, at least fidelity, and so self-denial, ‘service’, courtesy, honour, and courage. Its weakness is, of course, that it began as an artificial courtly game, a way of enjoying love for its own sake without reference to (and indeed contrary to) matrimony. Its centre was not God, but imaginary Deities, Love and the Lady. It still tends to make the Lady a kind of guiding star or divinity – of the old-fashioned ‘his divinity’ = the woman he loves – the object or reason of noble conduct. This is, of course, false and at best make-believe. The woman is another fallen human-being with a soul in peril. … It is not wholly true, and it is not perfectly ‘theocentric’. It takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man’s eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars.”
Life is about relationships and memories.