Though Valentine’s Day is a lovey-dovey holiday –  i.e. all about throwing chocolate and meaningless cheap paper cards at people we desperately want to fall in love with – it wasn’t always this way. 

I think we’ve lost touch of what Valentine’s Day means, of the truest, most rooted meaning of the 14th of February. To gain a better understanding of the holiday and its original purpose, we need to travel back to Ancient Rome. 

According to many sources, such as History.com and NPR, Valentine’s Day comes from the Christian holiday honoring the Roman martyr Saint Valentine. A martyr is somebody who is killed for their testimony to their faith or ideals. So, Saint Valentine must have died preaching young love, or maybe the importance of giving Hallmark cards to your crush, right? Sort of, but in a more hardcore way. In Christian mythology, Saint Valentine’s lifelong pursuit was to uphold the sanctity of eternal marriage. The problem with this was that Emperor Claudius the Cruel, the leader of Rome during Saint Valentine’s life, didn’t like marriage. 

To condense a long story, Claudius wanted to maintain the strongest army possible, but people kept refusing to join because they just loved their wives too much, as History.com would put it. They couldn’t possibly leave their wives and fight. Honestly, I am with Claudius. How much of a bum do you have to be to love your wife and not join the military, what are you some kind of square? We all know when the current power says to do something, you follow it blindly. That’s a pretty well known fact, right? 

All jokes aside, because people wouldn’t throw themselves deep into enemy lines for him, Claudius issued a ban on marriage in 270 A.D., as cited in a PBS Article on famous romantics.

Back in ancient Rome, when something was banned, it wasn’t instated and then walked back after 12 hours for some shadowy government reason. Bans back then were more permanent and concrete. And if you disobeyed the ban, you didn’t get prison time or a slap on the wrist, or any kind of sissy modern day punishment we give to murderers and psychopaths. No, back then we punished newly weds and naysayers of a higher rule, with real punishments, like pelting them with stones or giant cages filled with spikes.

Regardless of the face of punishment, Valentine pursued in his endeavor, sticking to his belief of the sacrament of marriage being a God-given right. It’s almost admirable in a sense, putting your own life on the line to help others be free to practice as they choose. Perhaps that’s why, after all this time, the story of Saint Valentine still lives on. A tale of hope and endurance in the face of opposition. Regardless of that fact, Claudius wasn’t pleased.

So when Emperor Claudius found out that Saint Valentine was issuing marriages without his Emperor-ey consent, he got reasonably mad. 

His reasonable reaction to somebody trying to marry couples together? Drag Valentine out into the streets, beat him with clubs, and behead him.

Reasonable crashout, right? This actually seems like a mercy; he could have done so much worse, but Claudius was just such a nice guy he decided to give Valentine a lessened punishment. In retrospect, the name Claudius the Cruel seems a little exaggerated.

Now that we know the original history of Valentine’s Day, it’s plain to see why I feel we’ve lost the original meaning. It was never about mass consumption of fleeting and meaningless gifts. Valentine’s Day was never about big Teddy bears and heart decorations on street corners. It was never even about a longing to show those who you care about that they mean the world to you.The true meaning of Valentine’s Day is to ensure that nobody can love anybody ever, especially not if they want to get married. And today, hundreds of years later, we’re making an effort to embrace the true meaning of Valentine’s Day. 

As championing powers begin to arise, much like Claudius the Cruel, we’re moving closer to the vision of his empire. Powers incite rules and bans for the working class to follow, them having no choice but to obey. People prioritize themselves, their salary, their livelihood over anybody else. We buy and sell what we are told to fill the pockets of a shadowy figure with great influence. The cherry on top? Marriage rates have dipped below 50% in the United States. We are finally rejecting the love and care that Saint Valentine, and so many others, gave their lives to save. We are finally embracing a world devoid of kindness, of charity and selflessness.

You see, Valentine’s Day was always a confused holiday. It was never supposed to be about the man who died, and his faux noble cause. It should have always been about the man who killed him. And I think now is the time for change. To take back this holiday for the elites who it was wrongfully taken from. February 14th is Valentine’s Day no longer. It shall be henceforth known as Claudius the Cruel Day.