Valentine's Day, the first Valentine, and men

“Guys don’t get serious.” The young woman who made this statement was not a feminist but a member of a conservative religious sect that despises feminism and believes men were supposed to be “over” women. She seemed to believe that men are incapable of deep romantic love.

Camille Paglia has objected to Valentine’s Day being christened “V-Day” by “Vagina Warriors” in connection with Eve Ensler’s controversial play, “The Vagina Monologues.” Paglia says it turns “Valentine’s Day, the one holiday celebrating romantic harmony between the sexes, into a grisly memento mori of violence against women.”

Perhaps it is significant that this day celebrating that celebrates romantic love is named after a man.

However, the precise reason for that naming is shrouded in the mists of time and legend. According to History.com, “One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius I decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men.” The priest Valentine secretly continued to perform marriage ceremonies between women and young men despite the decree. Emperor Claudius I had him executed for officiating at these illicit weddings.

Another legend says Valentine was jailed for trying to help persecuted Christians escape from Roman prisons. In this version, Valentine sent the first “Valentine.” Writing to the woman he loved just before his execution, he signed the epistle “Your Valentine.”

Either way, the legendary origin of Valentine’s Day lies in a man’s commitment to romance. It would seem that the continuing tradition of it does the same. Indeed, this holiday leads to a peculiar but significant case of sexual role reversal in buying habits. According to the website Holiday Insights, “While 75% of chocolate purchases are made by women all year long, during the days and minutes before Valentine’s Day, 75% of the chocolate purchases are made by men.” It is a virtual certainty that the men buying chocolates are buying them for women.

Although men read few romance novels, there is some evidence that men are in fact the more romantic, and perhaps more romantically vulnerable, gender. A study by Zick Rubin, Anne Peplau, and Charles Hill found that “men tended to fall in love more quickly than women, and that men rated the desire to fall in love as a more important reason for having entered the relationship than women did.” Studying couples who had broken up, they learned that “women were somewhat more likely to end the relationship’ and that “men reported feeling more depressed, lonely, and unhappy after the end of the affair than women did.”

Perhaps instead of a time to reflect on violence against women, Valentine’s Day should be a time to put to rest a sexist stereotype against men.

“Guys don’t get serious.”

But they do. They really do.