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Love is a beautiful thing. It should be celebrated and sung from the rooftops where necessary. In a world full of madness anything beautiful is a relief. Love can be beautiful. It can be kind. It can also be intense and insane.
However, I like to call those expressions of love out for what they are, controlling and insecure. Thankfully this is not the type of love I’m speaking of here. I think this popular quote from 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 of The Book of Psalms says it all.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.
I look at those words and think, what a beautiful ideal. These expressions of love are such that most of us can only hope to express or experience them. Where the quote loses me is the bearing all things and enduring all things. Nope, not happening. But I digress.
I try to equate the love described above with the marketing of Valentine’s Day to the masses. That obligatory celebration of love relationships whittled down to the lowest common denominators:
- Red roses
- Red hearts
- Candlelit dinners
- Sappy cards
- The colour red
These clichéd symbols endlessly repeated in some form or another. There’s such a stark difference between these accepted tropes of love and the timeless love described in the quote from 1 Corinthians.
When local supermarkets design their yearly marketing campaigns I like to imagine some sad, depressed employee, sitting around the office table. He suddenly realises he hates his job and is completely fed up with trying to come up with some vacuous slogan that ensures this year’s romantic ready-meal sells enough units. He stands abruptly and yells at no one in particular: “Read The Book of Psalms for god’s sake!” then flounces out of the room. This liberated man goes to his office, collects his things, calls his wife and says: I’ve quit my job honey let’s go out and celebrate!”
Yet again, I digress.
Valentine’s day has become a mockery of love. The marketing gurus have ensured this is the case. Of course, I’m not completely cynical I know real love exists. It’s clear we have the ability to see beyond the false pressures of declaring love on this particular day.
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Looking up the origins of the day, I discovered that it was Saint Valentine of Rome, who inspired the madness. He died from being beheaded. Not the best energy to bring to a love date, but hey. Apparently, this poor martyr was beheaded by the evil Claudius the Cruel.
Emperor Claudius needed more soldiers for his armies and was somewhat annoyed that he couldn’t get men to sign up for his dastardly deeds. So he banned engagements and marriages in the hope of helping things along.
Valentine, realising the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. He was beheaded for his selflessness.
Let’s face it, Claudius probably had his heart broken at some point. Instead of just owning it and moving on, he chose to build his whole life around becoming heartless.
Perhaps Valentine, who was not allowed to have a partner as a priest, wanted to make sure others could experience romantic love. That’s why he ended up with no head. These are the crazy origins of our love celebrations.
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We now celebrate Valentine’s Day with robotic and casual energy. We go through the motions to prove a love that exists the other 364 days of the year. But that’s my whole premise. If love is true, it exists all of the time. If it’s real it is demonstrated on a daily basis.
Real love is taking out the trash even when you don’t feel like it because you know your partner appreciates it. It’s putting down the toilet seat because you don’t want your woman to screech in the middle of the night from sitting groggily on cold porcelain. Love is ignoring beard-burn from his scratchy kisses. It’s bringing them that cup of tea or coffee in bed even though they annoyed you the night before.
True love is forgiving the seemingly unforgivable because you know it is a love worth saving. It is listening deeply and remembering what was said because it matters. It’s showing how much you care in a hundred different ways-including accepting that you have fundamental differences in some areas.
Love such as this should be acknowledged and even given a specific day of celebration, why not? Yet that doesn’t have to mean losing ourselves to the madness. Nor does it mean allowing marketing gurus to create a super payday for their businesses. Let’s just keep cruel Claudius and headless Valentine in mind on this special day instead. They need our love most of all.
*Valentine’s Day History https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/st-valentine-beheaded
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This post is republished on Medium.
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