Valentine’s Day seems to be mostly about romantic love (which, by the way, causes the same brain chemistry as going slightly insane).
According to Wikipedia, this focus came about in the Middle Ages. The Catholic Church designated February 14 as the Feast of St. Valentine centuries before that, in honor of a martyr named Valentine. Apparently it was a popular name – there was more than one martyr named Valentine – and we don’t know anything about any of them, although some stories were made up about them in the Middle Ages. In 1969 the Catholic Church dropped the feast, as part of a purge of saints which were considered too legendary.
So here we are, with a day disowned by its originator, with a name alluding to someone no-one knows anything about, honoring something which makes your brain behave as though there were something a bit wrong with it.
Not that I’m against romantic love per se, But I would prefer it if today could honor and encourage a different sort of love. The sort of love which is more of a choice – the choice to go do something kind for someone else. I learned about the ‘choice’ kind of love when I was in Bible studies and listening to sermons. The famous passage in the Bible about love, often read at weddings (and which the name of my personal blog comes from), is, imo, a list of choices we can make. These aren’t necessarily ’emotionless’ choices – having compassion for others will encourage us to make them.
I suppose making someone you romantically love feel special today counts as an expression of ‘choice’ love. But if that’s all that happens today, everyone who isn’t in that sort of relationship is going to get left out. It would be neat if, for example, some people who romantically love each other could honor that love by together doing something out of ‘choice’ love for someone else.