Valentine's Day the true meaning of love has a true-life story

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Valentine's Day teaches us about the true meaning of love, sacrifice, and commitment. In the third century, the Roman Empire was ruled by Emperor Claudius II Gothicus, who was nicknamed Claudius the Cruel due to his harsh leadership and his tendency for getting into wars. To recruit enough soldiers, Claudius canceled all marriages and engagements in Rome, leading to thousands of couples seeing their hopes of matrimony dashed. However, a Christian priest named Valentine stood up for love and secretly married soldiers before they went off to war. When Emperor Claudius found out about the secret ceremonies, he had Valentine thrown into prison and deemed that he would be put to death.

Valentine was awaiting execution, he fell in love with a blind girl and wrote her a sonnet in ink that he squeezed from violets. Legend has it that his words made the blind woman see again, but the next day Valentine was clubbed to death by Roman executioners. Even centuries after his death, the story of Valentine's self-sacrificing commitment to love was legendary in Rome and the Catholic Church decided to create a feast in his honor on February 14. Valentine's Day, also called Saint Valentine's Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine, is celebrated annually on February 14. It originated as a Christian feast day honoring one or two early Christian martyrs and has become a significant cultural, religious, and commercial celebration of romance and love in many regions of the world.

There are a number of martyrdom stories associated with various Valentines connected to February 14, including an account of the imprisonment of Saint Valentine of Rome for ministering to Christians persecuted under the Roman Empire in the third century. An 18th-century embellishment to the legend claims he wrote the jailer's daughter a letter signed "Your Valentine" as a farewell before his execution. Another tradition posits that Saint Valentine performed weddings for Christian soldiers who were forbidden to marry. The 8th century Gelasian Sacramentary recorded the celebration of the Feast of Saint Valentine on February 14. The day became associated with romantic love in the 14th and 15th centuries when notions of courtly love flourished.

In 18th-century England, it grew into an occasion in which couples expressed their love for each other by presenting flowers, offering confectionery, and sending greeting cards. Today, Valentine's Day symbols include the heart-shaped outline, doves, and the figure of the winged Cupid. In Italy, Saint Valentine's Keys are given to lovers as a romantic symbol and an invitation to unlock the giver's heart. Saint Valentine's Day is not a public holiday in any country, although it is an official feast day in the Anglican Communion and the Lutheran Church. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, it is celebrated on July 6 in honor of Roman presbyter Saint Valentine, and on July 30 in honor of Hieromartyr Valentine, the Bishop of Interamna (modern Terni).

The relics of Saint Valentine were kept in the Church and Catacombs of San Valentino in Rome, which "remained an important pilgrim site throughout the Middle Ages until the relics of St. Valentine were transferred to the church of Santa Prassede during the pontificate of Nicholas IV". The flower-crowned skull of Saint Valentine is exhibited in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome. Other relics are found at Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, Ireland. Valentine of Terni was a bishop of Interamna, now Terni, in central Italy, and is said to have been martyred during the persecution under Emperor Aurelian in 273. His relics are at the Basilica of Saint Valentine in Terni (Basilica di San Valentino).

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Professor Jack B. Oruch of the University of Kansas notes that abstracts of the acts of the two saints were in nearly every church and monastery of Europe. There is also a third saint named Valentine who was mentioned in early martyrologies under date of February 14, but nothing more is known about him. February 14 is celebrated as St. Valentine's Day in various Christian denominations, and is given the rank of 'commemoration' in the calendar of saints in the Anglican Communion. In the 1969 revision of the Roman Catholic Calendar of Saints, the feast day of Saint Valentine on February 14 was removed from the General Roman Calendar and relegated to particular (local or even national) calendars for the following reason: "Though the memorial of Saint Valentine is ancient, it is left to particular calendars, since, apart from his name, nothing is known of Saint Valentine except that he was buried on the Via Flaminia on February 14." The feast day is celebrated in Balzan (Malta) where relics of the saint are claimed to be found, and also throughout the world by Traditionalist Catholics who follow the older, pre-Second Vatican Council calendar. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, St. Valentine is recognized on July 6, in which Saint Valentine, the Roman presbyter, is honoured.

Saint Valentine of Rome was a priest of Rome who was imprisoned for succouring persecuted Christians in the early 4th century. In the 5th or 6th century, a work called Passio Marii et Marthae published a story of martyrdom for Saint Valentine. Bede's Martyrology, which was compiled in the 8th century, states that Saint Valentine was persecuted as a Christian and interrogated by Roman Emperor Claudius II in person. Before his execution, he is reported to have performed a miracle by healing Julia, the blind daughter of his jailer Asterius, and his forty-six member household, family members and servants, came to believe in Jesus and were baptized. The legend was picked up as fact by later martyrologies and was repeated in the 13th century, in The Golden Legend.

There is an additional embellishment to The Golden Legend, which according to Henry Ansgar Kelly, was added in the 18th century and widely repeated. This legend has been published by both American Greetings and The History Channel. John Foxe, an English historian, and the Order of Carmelites state that Saint Valentine was buried in the Church of Praxedes in Rome, near the cemetery of Saint Hippolytus. According to legend, he planted a pink-blossomed almond tree near his grave, performed clandestine Christian weddings for soldiers who were forbidden to marry, and cut hearts from parchment to remind them of God's love. He also wore a purple amethyst ring, a recognizable symbol associated with love, and amethyst has become the birthstone of February, which is thought to attract love.

Folk traditions connected with Saint Valentine and St. Valentine's Day have become marginalized by modern customs, but there are still some connections with the advent of spring. In Norfolk, a character called 'Jack' Valentine knocks on the rear door of houses leaving sweets and presents for children. Saint Valentine or Zdravko was one of the saints of spring, the saint of good health and the patron of beekeepers and pilgrims. He is celebrated as the day when the first work in the vineyards and fields commences, and birds propose to each other or marry on that day. The "Feast" (Latin: "in natali", lit.: on the birthday) of Saint Valentine originated in Christendom and has been marked by the Western Church of Christendom in honour of one of the Christian martyrs named Valentine, as recorded in the 8th century Gelasian Sacramentary.

In Ancient Rome, Lupercalia was observed February 13-15 on behalf of Pan & Juno, pagan gods of love, marriage & fertility. The celebration of Saint Valentine is not known to have had any romantic connotations until Chaucer's poetry about "Valentine's Day" in the 14th century. 

Gelasius I replaced Lupercalia with the celebration of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and claimed a connection to the 14th century's connotations of romantic love. However, the dates do not fit because at the time of Gelasius I, the feast was only celebrated in Jerusalem and it was on February 14 only because Jerusalem placed the Nativity of Jesus (Christmas) on January 6. Alban Butler in his The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints (1756–1759) claimed that boys and girls drew names from a jar to make couples, and that modern Valentine's letters originated from this custom. However, this practice originated in the Middle Ages, with boys drawing the names of girls at random to couple with them. The first recorded association of Valentine's Day with romantic love is believed to be in the Parliament of Fowls (1382) by Geoffrey Chaucer, a dream vision portraying a parliament for birds to choose their mates. 

William Shakespeare's poem "The Parliament of Fowls" refers to a supposedly established tradition of birds mating on St. Valentine's Day, but there is no record of such a tradition before Chaucer. Henry Ansgar Kelly has observed that Chaucer might have had in mind the feast day of St. Valentine of Genoa, an early bishop of Genoa who died around AD 307, and that the treaty providing for Richard II and Anne's marriage, the subject of the poem, was signed on May 2, 1381. Jack B. Oruch notes that the date on which spring begins has changed since Chaucer's time because of the precession of the equinoxes and the introduction of the more accurate Gregorian calendar only in 1582. Three other authors who made poems about birds mating around the same years: Otton de Grandson from Savoy, John Gower from England, and a knight called Pardo from Valencia, may have influenced Chaucer, but due to the difficulty of dating medieval works, it is not possible to ascertain which of the four may have influenced the others. The earliest description of February 14 as an annual celebration of love appears in the Charter of the Court of Love, allegedly issued by Charles VI of France at Mantes-la-Jolie in 1400.

The charter describes lavish festivities, including a feast, amorous song and poetry competitions, jousting and dancing. The earliest surviving valentines in English appear to be those in the Paston Letters, written in 1477 by Margery Brewes to her future husband John Paston "my right well-beloved Valentine". Valentine's Day is mentioned ruefully by Ophelia in William Shakespeare's Hamlet (1600–1601).