Valentine's Day: Thanks for Nothing, Cupid

I currently do not know what is worse – coming to terms with facing my twenty-second Valentine’s Day without a lover or the fact that my sister is going to have swollen gums due to the surgical removal of her wisdom teeth on a day where love is meant to sprout, also considering she has a number of potential suitors. If I laugh at my sister, I also am laughing in mockery of myself and in how pathetic my love life is, how every time I get close to somebody I always manage to get further away when it is too late to attempt applying band-aids on things that are not aided with band-aids. So what is Valentine’s Day? And why is this horrible-to-singles day still being celebrated?

Valentine’s Day was known as Saint Valentine’s Day, named after a Catholic man named Valentinus, who was imprisoned for performing weddings wherein soldiers who were forbidden to marry, did marry. During Valentinus’ imprisonment, he allegedly healed Asterius’, his jailer’s daughter, and before Valentinus was executed, he wrote a farewell letter to her, signed, ‘Your Valentine’. Saint Valentine allegedly was executed on February the 14^th, and people today commemorate his death by fornicating with other people, and in their much earlier years, sending adorable love letters to others.

A supposed reason as to why Valentine’s Day is celebrated is to lure away Pagans from celebrating Lupercalia, a day dedicated to turn away evil spirits and purify the city wherein Lupercalia is being celebrated. This usually lasts from the 13^th to the 15^th of February. An English fellow, by the name of Geoffrey Chaucer, or his alter-ego ‘the Father of English Literature’, had romanticized Valentine’s Day and ever since then, the 14^th of February was disassociated with cleansing the city, and rather, associated with spraying the city with sticky, courtly love.

In the eighteenth century, England then coined the tradition of making Valentine’s Day an occasion wherein lovers showed love for one another by gift-exchanging things such as flowers, chocolates, greeting cards, and fertility ingredients. Due to this, Supermarkets nowadays are quite successful in selling these things – not fertility ingredients, though, rather fertility ingredient entrapments.

Cupid, then, the God of desire and erotic love, is certainly not to blame for shooting arrows in the wrong direction. This innocent Godly figure is born to shoot arrows in whatever direction he pleases, and whether or not the lovers affected share a mutuality is not his problem. He is seen as an icon on Valentine’s Day, thanks to contemporary culture. Some human had placed the entire burden of unrequited love on this winged figure, and most humans are constantly accusatory towards him. Too bad his beliefs lie in love, otherwise he would have shot people with poison arrows as a form of vengeance.

It is only when I am presented with a bouquet of violets on Valentine’s Day that I shall marry the presenter. For the correct flow to be associated with February the month of love, is the violet, and not the rose. If somebody gifts you a rose, then they most certainly want access to the red bud within you.

So this Valentine’s Day, remember that we could instead by purifying our cities, our selves, the people around us, not shaking our fists at poor Cupid. Cupid means no harm. You cannot ask a train to move swiftly if it does not have tracks in front of it, nor can you ask Cupid to make somebody fall in love with you. And, well, seeing as these twenty-two years have not granted me any form of decent luck, I suppose I shall shake my fist at Cupid for the next twenty-two years. That is not to rule out, though, any form of affection I will possibly receive tomorrow - after all, today only is the 13^th. And as for my unfortunate sister, I suppose she will be shaking two fists at whatever God in charge of  dental surgery.