Valentine's Day: 5 Things You Didn't Know

Actually, Valentine’s Day used to be a celebration back when the Romans welcomed the spring with Lupercalia, but today the better term is “burden,” and not just for men but for women too. Expectations run high, and we scramble to meet them by burning about $17 billion. What do we spend all this money on? Cards we don't keep, flowers that don't last, and candy we could do without, that’s what. These ephemeral Valentine’s Day gifts amount to superficial grandstanding, and any time social convention presses on one half of a couple to do something for the other half, you can bet that whatever is done will be in the wrong spirit and will inevitably lead to the kind of resentment that poisons a relationship.


As we gear up to recognize yet another February 14th, we present 5 things you didn't know about Valentine's Day.

1- Valentine is the patron saint of plague and epilepsy
The first thing you didn't know about Valentine's Day is that it's not just about love and couples, it's also about neurological disorders and highly infectious diseases.

The Catholic church acknowledges at least 10 figures named Saint Valentine, each with his own feast day, but the one traditionally regarded as the Saint Valentine was a third century Roman priest who lost his head in the year 269 under the reign of the Roman Emperor Claudius II. Over 200 years later, Pope Gelasius declared February 14 the feast day to honor him, and from there Catholics began to pile on the patronage. According to Catholic Online, Valentine is the patron saint of a host of areas of life, including love, lovers, engaged couples, and happy marriages, as well as bee keepers, fainting, epilepsy, and plague.

2- Valentine’s Day is banned in Saudi Arabia
Not everyone has love for Valentine’s Day: In Pakistan, it's “a shameful day”; in India, a Hindu group built a massive bonfire fueled by Valentine's Day cards; in Saudi Arabia, it's “a pagan feast” and for many years, that country's government-led Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices (also known as the mutawwa), was said to carry out inspections of public places like gift shops and hotels looking to confiscate evidence of Muslim couples participating in Valentine's Day.

Despite this, many people in the countries that officially shun the holiday as nothing more than Western immorality seem even more determined than ever to celebrate it. According to a young Iranian quoted in The New York Sun anxiously looking forward to Valentine's Day: "The crackdown only strengthens my position in rejecting the hard-line clerical rule."

This is perhaps the only way to save Valentine's Day -- ban it. Drive it underground. Make it illicit. That would at least inject some excitement into a holiday that has otherwise become obligatory and boring.

3- The pope once gifted the remains of Saint Valentine
Another thing you didn't know about Valentine's Day is that its namesake doesn't just inspire gifts, he actually was one.

John Spratt was an Irish preacher who built Our Lady of Mount Carmel at Whitefriar Street in Dublin. In 1835 he went to Rome and delivered a sermon that went over so well with the locals that Pope Gregory XVI himself sent Spratt a token of his appreciation: some of the remains of Saint Valentine himself. After a few years, the remains went into storage, where they spent over a century before getting hauled out and made the focus of a shrine.

For its part, the Catholic Church isn't missing him. Unable to confirm anything at all about the guy, in 1969 it reduced him to the status of non-entity by striking him from the Roman Catholic Saints Calendar.

4- The largest Valentine’s Day chocolate heart weighed 7 metric tons
Valentine's Day is a minefield for suckers looking for any opportunity to go overboard to prove their love, when a simple, heartfelt gesture will generally do. Organizations like the National Confectioners Association expect to sell as many as 36 million heart-shaped boxes of chocolate for Valentine's Day, and internet dating services use this time of year to issue press releases featuring curious statistics about love, marriage, greeting cards, and the enormous success of internet dating services.

Every so often, the two come together in a promotional stunt so phenomenally stupid that it lands in the Guinness World Records -- right where it was designed to land. Meet one such stunt, the massive seven ton chocolate Valentine's Day heart, made by Chocovic, Spain's largest chocolate maker, and sponsored by online dating site Match.com -- a marriage made in that most romantic of places, Madison Avenue.

5- Homicides and beatings spike around Valentine’s Day
The last thing you didn't know about Valentine's Day is how dangerous it is.

According to Gerald Falk in Murder: An Analysis of its Forms, Conditions, and Causes, the number of homicides and incidences of partner violence against women go up in the days preceding and following Valentine's Day, compared to a huge majority of other weeks in the year. Considering the level of stress involved, this isn't terribly surprising, since incidences of violence against women have also been shown to go up following natural disasters.