Valentine’s Day is associated with love and lovers. While I was in the age of the lover, the day was not as popular or as talked about as it is today.
As love is an evergreen emotion in humans, everything related to love attracts me. But St. Valentine has left me vexed for long since there is no real historical-factual connection between this 3rd century Roman saint and love per se .
Virtually nothing is known about St. Valentine, who is commemorated on February 14. The first reference to the idea that St. Valentine’s Day is a special day for lovers is apparently found in the 14th century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem titled ‘Parlement of Foules’. In an article titled ‘St. Valentine, Chaucer and Spring in February’ (published in 1981), Jack B. Oruch says there was no known connection between Valentine and romance prior to Chaucer. He concludes that Chaucer was likely the original myth-maker in this instance.
Whether there is any historical connection between St. Valentine and Valentine’s Day, we celebrate it as lovers’ day and it will continue to be celebrated as love is a feeling and an emotion that will not fade as long as there are humans on the face of Earth.
I started celebrating Valentine’s Day after my marriage, but at home this year’s Valentine's Day virtually turned out to be enemies’ day instead of being lovers’ day. On February 14, my wife lovingly asked me whether I had loved anybody as passionately as I now love her. I answered in the affirmative and told her everything about my former lover, before I married her. She was a student in the ‘parallel college’ where I had been teaching English before I left for Jawaharlal Nehru University. She had large eyes, abundant hair and an innocent smile, and I told my wife all these things. Then she asked me whether she was more beautiful than she herself is. To that question also I answered in the affirmative and the answer virtually ruined Valentine’s Day, and neither of us has yet recovered from the ill-feeling that day created in us.
She then started asking me: “Why didn’t you marry your beautiful lady?” She put an irritating kind of stress while mouthing ‘your beautiful lady’, and the nagging was insufferable. When it became too unbearable, I told her it would indeed have been better had I married my beautiful lady. I used an affectionate stress while pronouncing ‘my beautiful lady’ and then all hell broke loose. “Go and find your beautiful lady ,” she told me ferociously.
Actually my wife is as beautiful as the girl whom I had loved passionately and today I love my wife so passionately that she herself often complains that my love suffocates her.
It was on this year’s Valentine’s Day that I discovered the important lesson: Never tell your wife that you had loved a beautiful lady before you married her. To your wife you should only say: “No other lady is as beautiful as you are.”
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