St.Valentine Day History And 2 Modern Real Life Examples Of True Love

Valentine’s Day is all about love and celebrating the emotion of love, right? Each year as February, 14^th approaches most of us get busy in anticipation of the big day of love. Well, none of us want to stop and ponder how St. Valentine came to be associated with a day of love. Curious to know about the origins of Valentine’s Day, I probed around for stories and facts and look here is what I came up with

St. Valentine was a Roman priest who lived around the time when the country had a tyrannical emperor called Claudius. Now our tyrannical Mr. Claudius had some pretty weird ideas when it came to marriage and relationships.

It is said that during his regime as emperor, he had a rule / edict in place with regard to his soldiers. None of the soldiers were allowed to marry and this was merely based on the Mr. Emperor’s weird conclusion that unmarried soldiers fight better than married ones.

He probably thought that married soldiers would hold back from fighting in the right spirit of combat for the fear of ending up dead and leaving their wives and children bereaved and bereft.

Well, as would be logically concluded, many of the soldiers were not pleased with Mr. Emperor’s and found his edict to be totally ridiculous and unentertaining. So now they worried their little heads over the next best thing to do, that would provide a solution from this unromantic problem.

I am not sure what encouraged these soldiers to approach St. Valentine, but that is what they did and urged him to find a solution on their behalf. St. Valentine came up with a brilliant idea for these soldiers who wanted to serve Mr. Emperor without sacrificing their conjugal pleasures with Mrs. Wife. He agreed to marry any soldier who was interested, under strict secrecy and according to the holy laws of Christianity. Needless to say, there were many takers for this quick fix solution by St. Valentine.

Everything was great for a while. The soldiers were happy; their new wives were happy and many new happy children from such happy unions also came into the world. But secrets like these rarely remain hidden and being the nosy emperor that he was, Claudius got wind of all these activities taking place behind the curtains.

What St. Valentine did was a good deed but Claudius thought otherwise. He promptly put St. Valentine behind bars and many stories abound about the various tortures and troubles meted out to him in prison. But one story that gets all the attention is about a blind girl who was healed by St. Valentine’s prayers and regained vision. Ironically, she was the daughter of one of the law officers in the court of Claudius, named Asterius.

Asterius was supposed to judge St. Valentine and vote for his punishment, but as fate would have it, his daughter regained her sight with the prayers of St. Valentine. This miracle encouraged Asterius to convert his religious faith and accept Christianity.

The last letter written by St. Valentine was to Asterius’ daughter and he signed it as ‘your Valentine’. Eventually St. Valentine was beaten, stoned and then decapitated. Well, that is how St. Valentine came to be associated with love and saint of lovers, and the rest as they say is history.

It was in the beginning of 2012; on January 9^th, 2012 (to be more specific) that I came across a highly controversial news on the internet. In Thailand a man named Chadil Deffy decided to marry Sarinya, his girlfriend of last 10 years. Awesome isn’t it? What is so great about this story, you ask me? Okay, for starters, how about the fact that this girlfriend was dead for almost 6 days when she was getting married to her man?

According to Deffy, both of them wanted to get married to each other but had been stalling the wedding plans to give Deffy some time to complete his education. But when Sarinya died suddenly in a car accident, Deffy was left feeling guilty. He wanted to fulfill her deepest desire of getting married to him and so he decided to combine her funeral with a wedding.

This in my opinion is the most poignant modern love story that transcends death.

Mark Aulger was suffering from colon cancer and he was receiving treatment for it. But then, like all terminal cancers do, it spread to other parts of the body. For Mark, the cancer cells which had metastasized to his lungs it seemed that his lungs were plastered in a coat of cement, rendering him literally breathless and unable to sustain without assistance from medical devices.

Knowing fully well that Mark would not survive long enough to see the birth of his baby, his wife Diane decided to induce labor prematurely by about 2 weeks. All she wanted was to allow her dying husband to hold their baby girl Savannah in his arms before he left this world.

Mark is said to have held on to his baby girl for 45 minutes after she was born and then later on in the evening, his condition deteriorated and he lapsed into a coma. Five days later he died, leaving a grief stricken family. His baby girl will never have the chance to share any more moments of her life with her dead father, but those first 45 minutes of her life spent in her dad’s arms are truly memorable and definitely stay with her for her lifetime.

Diane’s love for her husband is a heart-rending example of sacrifice and willingness to take trouble for someone you love truly.

All these stories only make my belief in love more stronger and in my opinion, St. Valentine sacrificed his life for a great cause. It definitely makes sense to name a day of love as Valentine’s day.