St. Valentines day is not about love or sex. It is about romance. Romance is that something from which one hopes, one will be led, to love and sex. Romance is the route one must take to love and sex. Romance is not the destination. It is love and sex that are the destination. And therein lies the problem! - for too many people, especially women, confuse the route with the destination. And when they reach the destination (love and/or sex), they are not satisfied, for they ask themselves: 'but where is the romance gone?'
Romance is not love. It is the dream of love. Romance is not sex. It is the foreplay of foreplay. Romance is the spring of loves year. It is the rosy dawn of an effulgent passion-full bright day. When romancing one gives one's desired one flowers and chocolates. These gifts are more apt than you think. A flower seduces a bee with pollen to do its service of fertilization. Chocolate contains phenethylamine (something I learnt in biochemistry class), a chemical produced internally in the brain by people undergoing sexual infatuation. Presented together, both flowers and chocolate, are the ultimate seducer of the seductee. This is also the reason why on Valentine's day sales of lingerie outstrip sales of kitchen cutlery by 10:1, for whereas cutlery is an adjunct of blissful domestic arrangements associated with long-term affections, lingerie however is part of the invitation process as in - come hither sorceress of my loins!
In the austere days of republican Rome, Cato the Censor expelled Lucius Manilius from the Senate for kissing his wife in public. And then since then we have the explosion of chastity that gripped the Middle Ages, Christianity and Islam from AD 400 onwards. Recognising that female beauty is the most powerful drug in the world, theologians have since then, sought to nip the bud of romance, by requiring women to disguise, what biology hath given them; namely their flowing hair and curvaceous hips, under veils and shapeless robes.
In the Middle Ages the fact that birds began to sing and pair and mate in mid-February gave rise to the association between St Valentine's Day and courtship. Chaucer said: '...for this was on seynt Valentyne's day, when every foul cometh there to chase his mate'. Oscar Wilde once said that romance is deception. Deception it may be, but who can deny that romantic illusions; be they delusions, add colour to reality's monochrome, and enliven hope, and are thus a good and welcome illusion therefore!
Oh, the pleasures of love
the deeds of St Valentine's
The silly thoughts that sail
right through my lovestruck mind!
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