valentines

Happy Valentine's Day.
Since 498 CE.
From Stephanie Coontz, in today's Times:

Before he was either a saint or a holiday, Valentine was a Christian priest martyred in the third century. Some legends said he was executed for defying an edict against conducting marriages for Roman soldiers, whom the emperor believed would fight better without family ties. In one account, Valentine fell in love with his jailor's daughter and wrote her a poignant goodbye letter signed "from your Valentine."

But when the church declared Feb. 14 St. Valentine's feast day in 498 A.D., it was not trying to celebrate romance. Rather, the Church wanted to replace the existing holiday, a festival honoring Juno, the Roman goddess of love and marriage. Church fathers probably hoped as well that a Valentine holiday would undercut the Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia, which began each Feb. 15. According to Roman custom, on Feb. 14 - the night before Lupercalia - boys would draw names from a jar to find which girls would be their sexual partner for the rest of the year.

The church roundly condemned such pagan practices, but not because it idealized love-based courtship.
...

They had a point. High expectations of married love can lead to huge disappointments, and free choice means that an individual can refuse to settle for a marriage where love is absent. Thus modern marriage almost inevitably brings higher divorce rates. Prince Charles and Diana Spencer, for instance, could have had a very stable marriage if she had not refused to live with the traditional disconnect between love and marriage - a disconnect that both Charles and his new fiancée, Camilla Parker Bowles, were prepared to accept 20 years ago (though presumably not today).

But today's high expectations are a monumental improvement over the past, when violence, adultery and day-to-day misery were considered normal in a marriage. So when couples look soulfully into each other's eyes tonight over a romantic Valentine's dinner, they might take a moment to remember that despite the risk of divorce today, never before in history have people have had so many opportunities to make marriage fulfilling.