Nazrana Darvesh
Month of February is known for its most awaited day i:e The Valentine’s day- a day marked for love and expressing love through costly gifts/ surprises/extra ordinary adventures proving their love for the partners whether married or not.
The roots of valentine’s day lie in ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia also known as “Feast of the Wolf” celebrated on February 15 . On Lupercalia young man would draw the name of a young woman in a lottery and would then keep the woman as a sexual companion for the year. Among other equally wicked practices associated with this day was the lashing of young women by two young holy men, to make them better able to bear children. When Christianity came onto the scene in Rome, it wanted to replace this feast with something more in line with its ethics and morality and February 14 was selected for this purpose. This was when the Italian Bishop Valentine was executed by the Roman Emperor Claudius II for conducting secret marriages of military men in the year 270. It was in the year 496 that Pope Gelasius officially changed the February 15 Lupercalia festival to the February 14 St. Valentine’s Day. As well, Pope Gelasius ordered a slight change in the lottery for young women and replaced it with the names of saints. Men and women were allowed to draw from the box, and the purpose of this was to copy the ways of the saint they had selected for the rest of the year. There are many other theories related to this day without any written documentation but St Valentine’s theory is being most popularly accepted. Later Valentine ’s Day gained popularity when Chaucer and Shakespeare romanticized it through their plays and poetries and it was celebrated in different ways in different parts of the world.
The French used to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a custom called “une loterie d’amour,” or “drawing for love.” During the celebration, men would walk down neighborhood streets shouting for women, who would then call out from their home’s windows. Eventually, the men and women would pair up. However, men would often ditch their original match if a more appealing option became available. Then, the women would start a bonfire in the street and throw in pictures and remnants of old boyfriends, while cursing the men who had rejected them.
Due to this hard feeling and trouble which the day used to bring, French government banned the practice in 1776. The practice was slowly dying in other countries too. Later enterprising Yankees spotted a good means of making money from this celebration. Esther A. Howland, who produced one of the first commercial American Valentine’s Day cards called— what else— valentines, in the 1840s, sold $5,000 worth–when $5,000 was a lot of money–the first year. The valentine industry has been booming ever since.
And as visible today the commercialization of love is at its peak. The market is flourished due to huge demand of cards, flower bouquets, love bands, Gold, silver, chocolates, cakes etc for this day and probably for the whole month of February. According to Market research firm IBIS World Valentine’s day sales reached 18.8 billion in 2014 and in 2015 it was 19.8 billion.
No matter how loyal you be to your partner in your relationship, if you miss to impress him/ her on this sole special day set out to celebrate love, your loyalty proves wrong and your love a fake love. Love today is packaged in a day with materialistic things and emotions connected to it are mostly dead.
Despite this increase in celebration of Valentine’s day and proving of love through whatsoever way on this day there is sufficient rise in divorces and breaking relationships. This shows that ‘Love can’t be bought and sold’ through costly gifts nor can be expressed through expenditure of wealth but the true feeling connecting it to the heart matters.
Valentine’s day is not only a business strategy but a opening for relationships which are momentary, based on infatuation, and short term intimacy mostly sexual. Such relationships mostly leave bitter fruits such as teen pregnancy, depression due to unsuccessful love affairs, sense of guilt, self hatred for losing one’s dignity by been used and abandoned, and suicides due to heartbreaks. The history of valentine’s day too has witnessed this ill effects as seen in Lupercalia festival and French ‘ Drawing of Love’.
Sadly we have confined our love only for this special day with heavy expenditures on materialist things. Love is not something which is a celebration for a day but it should be an everyday routine for our Creator, our parents, life partners, children, relatives, neighbour’s, friends and even enemies, may not be in the form of costly gifts to bloom the capital market but in the form of allotting our time to them, understanding their problems and being a solution to them or just chill with them. There can be acts of charity and social service for deserved people making them feel loved and cared too.
