The Roman romantics were drunk. They were naked!

- Noel Lenski, professor of religious studies at Yale.

Brace yourselves, sweet seekers of kissy-romance and candy hearts, for Valentine's Day, the commercial holiday of insufferable romantic comedies, has a dark and twisted history that would make even the most wicked of hearts skip several beats.

You see, it all began in ancient Rome, as most things do. From February 13th to 15th of each year, the Romans celebrated a feast to encourage fertility for the people, the fields, and the flocks. The month of February takes its name from the instruments of purification (februa) used in such rites. The best known of these festivals was Lupercalia, a festival in celebration of Lupercus (or Luper, the son of Fauna), a very horny (literally) god of fertility. Now, this wasn't your average run-of-the-mill orgy, oh no. This was a wild and raucous celebration of fertility, where men would sacrifice goats and dogs and then proceed to whip the women with the hides of the poor animals. I know, I know, it's definitely not woke - it sounds like something absurdly lurid straight out of a Monty Python sketch, but it's true. Unfortunately, if that wasn't enough, they had a matchmaking lottery as well, where young men and women would be paired together by drawing their names out of a box. The precursor to the wife-swapping "car keys" game - just imagine the disappointment when you got paired with the local goat herder instead of that vestal virgin you had your eye on!

Fast forward a few centuries, and along came Pope Gelasius I (a pontiff with a lot of outstanding Pagan issues to deal with), who decided that the festival of Lupercalia needed a bit of a modern conservative makeover. So he went and replaced it with St. Valentine's Day to honor the titular Saint Valentine, one of a brace of Christian martyrs. Now, the tricky thing was that there were a number of Christian martyrs by the name of Valentine (but none named “Biggus Dickus,” sadly), so it's not entirely clear which of the often tortured and executed martyrs the holiday of compassion and love was to be named after. Clearly, the Romans had little time for irony too. Some say the real Valentine was a priest who was executed for secretly marrying couples in the Roman Empire when Emperor Claudius II banned marriages to have more able (but presumably very grumpy) soldiers in his army.

In the Middle Ages, Valentine's Day was celebrated as a fashionable courtly love festival where lovers would exchange romantic messages and gifts. A little known bard named William Shakespeare also did his bit for glamorizing and romanticizing Valentine’s Day. But it wasn't until the 18th and 19th centuries, when the printing press made it possible to mass-produce cards, that Valentine's Day really took off and became the commercialized holiday we know and mostly love today. So, there you have it, the dark and slightly twisted history of Valentine's Day. Who knew that a holiday of love and romance had such a wonderfully sordid past? Indeed, we should thank all those men named Valentine for their ultimate sacrifices, gone but not forgotten by history. It really does remind us that love is unpredictable and can come from the most unexpected and unlikely places. Be good to each other.