Valentine’s Day: Love in the Time of Money, Lust and Moral Decay

Long gone are the days when Valentine’s Day celebrated true romantic love. Today, just like most holidays, Valentine’s Day is a celebration of commerce rather than love. It is just like Christmas, another holiday for the benefit of the merchants. If some love is in the air, as every February 14, a lot more money than love will be exchanged in the process. The commercialization of romantic love will benefit florists, chocolate manufacturers, Victoria Secret and restaurants. Just like about everything else in our monetized world, romantic love comes with a price tag.

In the Middle-Age, when courtly love-romantic love- started this notion had no correlation with material issues. Courtly love was a paradoxical experience of erotic desire and spiritual connection between lovers which today seems to be in complete opposition. Courtly love was a study in complexity and contrast, but not a futile exercise in contradiction. On one hand, on the erotic side it was often about breaking taboos, drifting into the irrational passion of lust without caring about humiliation and social stigma. On the other hand, it was pure, altruistic, of the highest moral order and almost transcendent.Romantic love was always dangerous, often secret and socially outside the norms.

Romantic love was never a “meat and potatoes” dinner, it was a feast reserved for the aristocracy. Marriage at the time, and one could argue that few things have changed, was mainly a business transaction. Within the aristocracy and amongst the European royal families marriages were not about love, but about wealth management and consolidation and political alliances between Kingdoms. The same logic was applied all the way down the social food chain. In India, until very recently marriages were arranged by parents with almost no say for the bride and groom to be in the matter.

In our time obsessed with money and social status, very little has changed as far as marriages being essentially business arrangements where the lust of sexual attraction serves as lure-at least for one of the partners- at the initiation and then as cement with a short life span if the lust element is the primary bond to the relationship. Currently, around 50 percent of all marriages, in the Western world where women can divorce freely, end up in divorces. Typically, couples fight and divorce over money and sex. However, since the economic crash of 2008, this ratio of marriages ending up in divorces has improved slightly. It is certainly not because couples with problems are going massively for couple counseling- as they should- but rather because economically they cannot afford a separation even less a divorce. Instead, they often have to live with “the enemy” under the same roof.

Real love-romantic love- is rare, it is harder to find than a needle in a hay stack. It is never about money or gain in social status, it is not to be confused with sexual attraction either. Both aspect, material gains and lust, have finite life spans. For real love, which is neither lust nor material arrangement, to last the bond has to be deeper than what most people call love. It has to be based mainly on a deep connection between two individuals, as if they were spiritually tied by an invisible umbilical cord. Only this type of love, unlike ordinary love, can transcend trivial notions such as money, lust and practicality. That said, most people settle for less, a lot less, because what they call love is only a crutch against loneliness.