Love Is In The Air

Now that the Christmas decorations have been stored away, and the Cadbury’s Crème Eggs are starting to make an appearance in your local Tesco’s (!), our thoughts might be turning towards that paean to romantic love that is Valentine’s Day

It has its origins in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, which was held in mid-February. Lupercalia celebrated the coming of spring, and included fertility rites and the pairing off of women with men by lottery- a Roman equivalent of Married at First Sight. At the end of the 5th century, Pope Gelasius I, in his infinite wisdom, replaced Lupercalia with St. Valentine’s Day, with a view to banning notions of such ribaldry. The day was not associated again with love until the Middle Ages, where it was commonly believed in both France and England that February 14th heralded the beginning of the bird’s mating season, as mentioned by Chaucer in his Parliament of Fowls:

For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day, When every fowl comes there his mate to take

In the 21st century, amidst worries about the decline of handwritten letters, it is, perhaps, heartening to discover that, according to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated 145 million Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year across the countries that celebrate this festival. With a western society saturated with the commodification of what could – sometimes very loosely – be described as ‘love’, there is something reassuringly old-fashioned in the notion of sending a Valentine, particularly if the recipient is unaware of the sender. Therefore, as the nation will, allegedly, still be waiting to see which pneumatic, botox-injected young woman and artfully-coiffed and pumped-up young man emerge as the ‘winners’ of Winter Love Island, a Valentine’s card could be an antidote to modern representations of relationships in all their celluloid and online manifestations. As a foil to ‘fast love’, a piece of cheap cardboard, with a clichéd message, that might be conveyed by ‘snail mail, may be just what is needed. As Bacharach and David opined: “what the world needs now is love, sweet love.”