A Valentine Reflection on Romantic Love--and Some Lessons for Current Events

One of the picture books in my daughter's closet recounts the story of St. Valentine. According to the story, in ancient Rome there was a Christian priest named Valentine who married Christian couples in defiance of an imperial decree that young men remain single (on the grounds that single men made better soldiers). Valentine was subsequently arrested and martyred, but not before curing the blindness of his jailer's daughter...through the miraculous power of a letter he sent her, signed "From your Valentine."

So little is known about the actual Valentine that one would be hard pressed to claim that any part of this story book is factual. From what I can tell, the bit about marrying Christian couples in defiance of Roman law was a later addition to the legend. In the version that appears in Legenda Aurea in the 13th Century, this piece is not present. There, the story focuses on Emperor Claudius II taking a personal interest in Valentine and trying to convince him to save his life by disavowing his Christian faith in favor of the official religion of Rome. Valentine not only refused but tried to convert the emperor to Christianity, and so was put to death.

At some point, however, Valentine's Day became linked to romantic love, and so elaborations were added to the Valentine legend to justify this link. A quick glance at internet sources suggests that the jailer's daughter is more usually presented as deaf rather than blind, and that the miraculous letter is a pretty recent development (invented by greeting card companies, perhaps?).

But however tenuous the link between romantic love and the saint --actually more than one saint--for whom Valentine's Day is named, the rise of a holiday dedicated to romantic love tells us something about ourselves.

Part of what it tells us is surely about dominant culture. Not every human society has connected sexual desire, long-term partnership, and the cultivation of romantic feelings in the ways that we do.

Even so, culture elaborates on possibilities and dispositions that are part of human nature. Sexual appetite needn't be connected with that complex cluster of feelings we call romantic love. But it often is. And while culture can strengthen this connected or attenuate it, the roots of the connection are tangled up in our biological natures. That intimate bonding that expresses itself in cries of eternal devotion, that surging desire to melt wholly into another person, that addictive longing in which the mere presence of the beloved can bring a heady rush of feeling, and absence is an unbearable ache--all of this is the raw material for romantic love as we know it.

And as far as I can tell, this raw material manifests itself to greater or lesser degrees in essentially every culture and every human heart...whether or not romantic love is lifted up, whether or not it is cultivated, nurtured, and celebrated in the ways that we see in our culture.

And it's no wonder that our culture cultivates, nurtures, and celebrates this cluster of feelings and desires and attendant practices. Because wherever it flowers, it's wonderful. Our love lives can and do enrich us profoundly, even as they make possible heartbreak, jealousy, volatile waves of emotion, and the anguish of unrequited longing. The heights of romantic love, when attained, make all the attendant risks seem worth it. The mere memory of such heights can keep couples doggedly together through extended periods of alienation.

The peaks of volatile passion that hit early in a relationship cannot, of course, be maintained forever. It would be exhausting, and it would distract us from the business of living. But those peaks can set the stage for something else, something at times tender, at times comfortably intimate, at times (of course) frustrating and disappointing, and at times echoing and even reclaiming those early summits of intensity. At their best, those early peaks can help to forge the conditions for a lifelong partnership in which our capacity to love is explored in all its many forms, and deepened.

A few months ago my father passed away. My parents had been married 49 years. What they had in those years was a complex mix of shared experiences, early passion, comfortable closeness, mutual support--and, of course, all of the frustrations and conflicts that inevitable accompany human relationships. My father died as my mother held him, stroking his head. When she reflects on the loss, she says she had the privilege of spending 49 years with one of the best human beings she's ever known. Romantic intimacy served as a foundation for the creation of something beautiful--a lifelong love story that enriched both of the people who shared in it, as well as spilling over onto countless others.

Our bodies are intimately involved in this, of course. But romantic love cannot be reduced to the mechanics of sex. Romantic love isn't about putting this body part into that one. No one who has been in love would engage in such reductionism. What romantic love does is the opposite of reduction: It contextualizes and hence lift up the physical acts of sex, making it more than it would otherwise be. The kind of partnership my parents had likewise contextualizes romantic love itself--making it an integral piece of something greater.

Romantic love at its best is a very great good. It is a gift that can sometimes become an integral dimension of one of the greatest blessings of a person's life. This doesn't mean that a life can't be rich and rewarding without it, that there aren't a great multitude of ways that a human being can discover meaning and learn to flourish, even in the absence of such love. But our human longing for romantic love is not a trivial thing. The opportunities for real joy in this life are finite, and romantic love provides one important place where human beings can drink from the well of joy, where they can come to know depths and heights of value and meaning they might not otherwise have known.

To attempt to systematically deny anyone the opportunity for such love and the resources for nurturing it...this is a very grave matter. The legend of Valentine that is found in my daughter's picture book is really about just such an effort, and the heroic response of a saint who refused to bend before the coercive effort to shut down love. Who would do such a thing today?

Rick Santorum would. Numerous people who live in my neighborhood would. Those who push for constitutional amendments to prevent marriage equality are doing it all over the country right now. Because, of course, this is precisely what the categorical condemnation of homosexuality--and the attempt to deny marriage equality for gays and lesbians--amounts to.

Our sexual orientation does not merely determine who we are attracted to sexually. It determined with whom we are capable of experiencing romantic love. Because sexual orientation does not lie within our control, a rule that would prohibit sexual relations between two people of the same sex is a rule which would systematically exclude some people from romantic love.

It is a rule that says, to some people, the following: "You are never to have this very great good in your life. While those around you fall in love, get married, struggle for the heights of passion and the tender comfort of long-term intimacy, you are required to go through life completely cut off from this monumental human good. We permanently exclude you from access to this source of richness and meaning because of factors beyond your control. And if you happen to fall in love, to build an intimate partnership around this love, to nurture and support another person in all the ways that define the best marriages, we will call what you have forged an abomination, and we will treat it as something that ought to be destroyed. If we find that you are drinking from this well of joy, we will think it a good thing if you and your partner are torn away from one another, and the well filled up with concrete."

The part of the Valentine legend which says that Emperor Claudius made marriage illegal may be nothing but myth. But today, there is an Emperor Claudius. His spirit is at work in all those who seek to systematically deprive our gay and lesbian citizens of access to marriage, who seek to promulgate and enforce norms that would ensure that sexual minorities never know the joys of what is celebrated on Valentine's Day.

There are those who seek to justify this, who think there are good reasons for it. But given the enormity of what is being denied some people, the justification would have to be as powerful as the source of joy and meaning that some people are told they can never have access to.

Waving a napkin around the way Rick Santorum does isn't enough to justify such systematic exclusion from a profound human good. Pretending that it's just about sex and perversion doesn't cut it. Other arguments--appeals to a bare smattering of biblical proof texts or to a controversial working-out of a religious moral theory that roots ethical norms in the perceived purposes of biological plumbing--have never struck me as very compelling even within the Christian traditions that espouse them. And these arguments certainly can't be given decisive weight in a secular society that embraces the separation of church and state.

But it isn't my aim here to decisively refute the supposed justifications for the categorical exclusion of some human beings from one of the great joys of human existence. My aim is to highlight just how serious, just how presumptively wrong, such an exclusion is. My aim is to invite an application of the Golden Rule, to ask all of us on this Valentine's Day to think about what romantic love means to us in our lives, and to think about what it would mean for us were our deepest loves to be labeled abomination.

My aim is to invite everyone to imagine growing up being told something like the following: "Better to have never loved at all, or to have loved and lost, than to have found true love and been enriched by it."

My aim is to invite us to think about what we celebrate today, and then to think about living in a world where this good is celebrated by others but denied us. Imagine falling in love with a good soul, a beautiful person, being filled with all those feelings we call romantic love, and then being told, "Don't you dare act on those feelings. That would be an affront to the very creator of the universe. But that's just you, of course. I'm going to go home and drink deeply from the meaning that my marriage gives me. Look on and envy, but don't think of trying to commit such an awful abomination as to love in anything like the way I do.  That is a privilege reserved for people like me, who had the good fortune to be straight."
 
Only if we can appreciate what that is like can we have any claim on fairly assessing the moral status of condemning someone's propensity to love. Justifications for condemning same-sex love that don't begin with deep empathetic reflection on how it would be to have this done to us--justifications which so decisively ignore the Golden Rule--should never be taken seriously.