This Day of Love

So… today is that arbitrary day when we are supposed to recognize and celebrate romance. The idea behind it isn’t exactly a bad one. I’m always in favor of taking a moment to stop and appreciate what we often take for granted in the day to day. Same with Mother’s Day and Memorial Day. We do plow through our lives with oblivion most of the time. It is good to stop ourselves and think about stuff.

Only… our thoughts are aided significantly by chocolate, card, and flower manufacturers. And, even, now, on a less materialistic level, the Facebook status theme week. Even though the cynic in me thinks it is kind of silly, I have to admit I enjoy reading everyone’s mini love story. I’m a sucker for knowing how two separate beings decided to start holding hands and how long they choose to make it work.

But it’s still kind of random. And a lot of it is superficial. Not to mention hypocritical.

Like so many of our holidays and customs, this day is… believe it or not… rooted in pagan custom and history. It isn’t necessarily anything resembling the original Lupercalia… or even the story of the deified Valentine himself. But, I am a history geek and find the evolution of human sentiment fascinating. Or the fact that … some things haven’t evolved so much.

Maybe in between the Hallmark and Kay Jewelers commercials, you may have picked up the story of how this day became a mainstream tradition. Well, the Roman feast was a tribute to a she-wolf who suckled the founders of Rome. So young lads dressed up in animal skins in her honor and ran around Rome to strike women on the derriere. Because it made them fertile. Okay. Sure. They also had this random drawing for girls to pick boys’ names out of a box… with whom they would mate… and maybe fall in love.

But, you know, the Christians… they put it right. After Rome became a Catholic empire, Claudius the Cruel decided that he wasn’t going to let people get married. Why? Because men didn’t want to join the army and leave their beloveds. Well… obviously, you can’t stop people from loving one another and wanting to spend their lives together… so this priest Valentine just married them anyway. Claudius found out and hauled him off to prison … and because he was cruel, eventually killed him.

So in his name and honor, we use this date (supposedly of his death) to stop and reflect the romance in our lives. 

But… as I reread the history this morning… I thought to myself, we haven’t really evolved all that much. I mean, okay, we don’t drag prisoners through the street, beat them, and cut off their heads like the Romans did (well, not all of us anyway). But we still… we still have some of Claudius the Cruel’s attitude problem. We think we can regulate love.

It is a constant throughout history. Stopping marriages because of money. Because of religious differences, even if their nuance of Jesus Christ was different by a translation the Bible. Because of skin color. And now, in the modern world of vast information and technology and enlightened thought… because of gender.

I know I touch on this subject frequently here. But that’s because I can’t get over how STUPID it is to judge, to make laws, to deny basic rights to someone because of LOVE. It is stupid. And it likens us to that despotic Roman emperor.

So, today, I’m not going to begrudge the coupled persons of this world their special dinners, their flowers, their intimate moments to recognize how precious it is to have found someone. But I am going to begrudge our collective spirit of Happy Valentine’s Day when we still uphold the philosophy that made Valentine a martyr. To deny anyone a chance to marry is an injustice that must not be tolerated. To bask in the limelight of your freedom to love while we allow a society to restrict the definition of love IS cruel.  And not loving at all.