Walking around the supermarket, bombarded with reminders that Valentine’s Day was imminent, I started thinking about how I might show my love. My options seemed to be a card, chocolates, a special meal, a fluffy toy… All perfectly fine, yet all slightly hollow.
And then I thought: I’ll take inspiration from the olden days. I’ll do a modern take on the original rituals and run naked through the streets whipping my lover with a pork chop.
Allow me to explain.
Before Chocolates There Were Goats
Mid-February in ancient Rome was linked to Lupercalia, a fertility festival. Young men known as the Luperci had their foreheads touched with the blood of a sacrificed goat (symbolising fertility and sexual potency) or dog (linked to protection and purification).
Strips of goat hide were cut into narrow leather thongs, called februa (likely the origin of February), and naked or semi-naked men ran through Rome in a ritual run striking women with the hides. The women actively sought to be struck, believing it promoted fertility and eased childbirth. (I wonder whether it was an early form of S&M?) The ritual ended with the blood being wiped away with milk, and the men laughing - a detail that suggests this was all meant to be a bit of a lark.
Which means that my pork-chop idea isn’t really that unhinged, it’s more a historically informed attempt to spice things up and say “I love you”.
Enter The Saint
The Church of course had some thoughts on this ritual and later overlaid Christian meaning onto this charming pagan festival. Enter St Valentine, though which Valentine is a bit fuzzy, as there are at least two, possibly three options. One story has Valentine secretly marrying couples when marriage was banned by the Roman emperor Claudius II (married men being less keen to fight wars). Another says Valentine helped Christians escape Roman prisons. These stories don’t appear in contemporary records and were likely layered on later- part folklore, part moral storytelling.
What matters isn’t so much which Valentine was real, but what the story came to stand for. Somewhere along the way, a fertility ritual became a moral tale, and the moral tale was later absorbed into ideas about romantic love- eventually shaping how love came to be expressed, named, and expected.
Then, in the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer linked Valentine’s Day to courtly love. Around the same time there was a belief that birds began mating in mid-February, which added a neat layer of natural symbolism. From here, Valentine’s Day starts to tilt towards romance, pairing, longing, the flutter of love.
When Love Went to Market
Jump to the 19th century and Valentine’s Day starts to pick up accessories. Cards, gifts, commerce. Industrial printing makes romance scalable, and by the 20th century the message is clear: love should be demonstrated, ideally in public, and preferably with objects. Flowers. Chocolates. Dinner. Proof.
Until the early 21st century, Valentine’s Day was largely about romantic or sexual love. More recently, it’s acquired spin-offs: Galentine’s Day on the 13th for female friendship, Malentine’s Day as its male counterpart, Palentine’s Day as a gender-neutral version, and Singles Awareness Day on the 15th. There’s also the rise of “self-love” Valentine’s -a reframing that ranges from flowers and candles to rather more specialist equipment.
“I Love You”
If Valentine’s Day has become a way of showing love, then “I love you” is the line we repeat most often. “I love you” can sound perfunctory as you say it many times almost as a call and response.
How are you? I’m fine.
I love you. I love you too.
Remembering the first time you uttered the words, how hard that felt, how big a step it seemed. The shift from ‘I like you’ to ‘I love you’. But what exactly is that shift?
The Greeks Do Lots Of Love
The Greeks already worked with the idea that love wasn’t one single thing. They had words for different experiences we now tend to bundle together and expect to do everything.
There was
Eros: romantic, erotic, desire-driven love.
Philia: friendship, mutual respect, chosen connection.
Storge: familial, familiar love, often so close it goes unquestioned.
Ludus: playful, flirtatious, light love.
Mania: obsessive, anxious, gripping love.
Pragma: long-term, steady, negotiated love.
Philautia: the relationship you have with yourself, both healthy and unhealthy.
Later traditions emphasised agape: selfless, compassionate, universal love. And there’s also xenia, the love of hospitality and care for the guest or stranger.
Now we are getting somewhere. Not because the Greeks solved love, but because they refused to treat it as a single experience. They noticed its different shapes, its different textures, and the fact that not all of them feel exciting or even particularly romantic.
Yoga: Mind The Grip
Yoga comes at it from a different angle. Rather than dissecting love into types, it’s uninterested in defining love at all. There’s no section on how to love or be loved. Instead, yoga asks us to pay attention to what we’re doing with the feelings we already have: how we relate, how we attach, and how we respond when things don’t stay as we’d like them to.
In the Yoga Sutras, this is called rāga: the pull towards what feels good, and the urge to secure it. We fall in love and we love the feeling of it -feeling seen, wanted, chosen. And because it feels good, we want it to stay. We want to anchor it, name it, prove it. When that urge hardens into gripping and trying to hold the feeling in place, suffering follows. Not because love is wrong, but because we start asking it to hold still. And nothing does. Nothing stays the same. Feelings shift and people change. The difficulty isn’t love; it’s mistaking something temporary for something stable.
So perhaps Valentine’s Day doesn’t need another display of love. It needs a quieter question: what kind of love is this, and how can I express it without trying to trap it?
Which still leaves me standing in the supermarket aisle, wondering what to put in the basket.
P.S. If you’re in a love-themed mood, you might like another blog on the 36 Questions to Fall in Love.
Photo by Skylar Jean on Unsplash