To all satisfied spouses, singletons and star-crossed lovers everywhere, I bid you a happy Valentine’s Day. You may have already heard that Valentine’s Day began as a medieval feast day celebrating a handful of Christian martyrs all named “Valentine”, then slowly transmogriafied into a holiday for aristocratic lovers during the Renaissance, only to be shoved down the throats of the general public in the 19th century by industrialists who were mass-producing greeting cards.
But history is capable of ruining much more of the holiday for you than that. Here are a few factoids from my book, The Shortest History of Sex, to further dissect and butcher the holiday for your perverse enjoyment.
Sex itself is thought to have evolved two billion years ago during a period called ‘Snowball Earth’, when ice extended from the equator to the poles and our previously asexual and cloning microscopic ancestors starved and started eating each other. There may have been an accidental exchange of DNA during the microbial devouring process and, hey presto, the advantages of having genetic diversity in evolution may have given rise to all the amorous feelings any creature has felt ever since. In other words, sex may have started with cannibalism.
The instinct of a gentleman to traditionally furnish a lady with gifts on Valentine’s is derived from the past two million years of monogamy, where a man had to demonstrate his abilities as a protector and provider in order to be selected as a mate. Prior to that, for most of the past 40 million years, female primates just mated with the most dominant and genetically robust ‘alpha males’ while most other competing males were sexless and simply wiped out of the gene pool.
We still see this behaviour in baboons, orangutans and gorillas. Even two million years ago, when monogamy evolved, females still found the majority of males to be inadequate, so the gents had to bring a little something extra to the table as potential mates and fathers. And chocolates, flowers and jewellery are still a thing.
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If a happy couple is dressing up for a posh candlelit dinner on Valentine’s, it might not be quite as classy as it seems on the surface. The man might wear a suit jacket, again signalling his money-making provider abilities, but also with shoulder pads that make him seem a lot more physically imposing as a ‘protector’ than he really is. He might even wear a tie, which, having long since lost its practical role holding a shirt collar together, now just hangs there making subconscious references to his genitalia.