Martyrs, Mating Birds, and Manufactured Romance: AKA Valentine’s Day

What is Valentine’s Day?

Before roses and rom‑coms, there was Lupercalia – a mid‑February fertility festival with goat sacrifices, rituals, and a civic commitment to crops and conception.

Then Christianity adds another twist: legends of St. Valentine, a priest secretly marrying couples against the emperor’s orders, turning rebellion and romance into a martyr story.

Fast‑forward to the Middle Ages: Chaucer writes about birds choosing their mates on St. Valentine’s Day — “For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day, when every fowl comes there his mate to take” — and suddenly February 14 is officially about love.

The 1800s arrive. Enter Esther Howland, who builds a lace‑and‑ribbon empire spun out of her father’s paper shop. Before women were “allowed” to work, she saw a holiday built on hormones and said, “I can scale that.”

In 1910, a teenage entrepreneur, Joyce Hall (not a woman), starts selling handmade postcards in Kansas City and eventually builds Hallmark. Now we have the Valentine’s Industrial Complex: overpriced cards, scripted snowstorms, strategic sentimentality.

We took a wild fertility festival, baptized it in Christian legend, filtered it through medieval poetry, fortified it with female entrepreneurship, industrialized it with American hustle, and landed on… a prescribed greeting‑card holiday with a side-dish of chocolate and roses.

The evolution is absurd, impressive, and almost comical. Because every time we watch a Hallmark movie or send a cheesy Valentine, we’re tapping into centuries of martyrs, lovebirds, and scrappy founders — and our brain’s craving for ritual, reassurance, and proof that we matter to someone.

I love love. Which is precisely why I find it odd that we scheduled a day to celebrate it.

Love should be celebrated EVERY DAY — not just once a year — because decades of research show that close relationships and community are the strongest predictors of happiness and longevity.

Thank you for diving deep down this rabbit hole with me and… Happy Valentine’s!