Before It Was Sold

It began quietly, inside someone brave enough to notice.

Long before there were red balloons tied to grocery store aisles,
before there were roses flown across continents to die in glass vases,
before love was wrapped in plastic and priced according to urgency—
someone sat down and tried to describe what it felt like.

She lived on an island.

Her name was Sappho.

Nearly 2,600 years ago, on the Greek island of Lesbos, she wrote about love not as ceremony, but as disturbance. She wrote about trembling hands, about the body becoming weak, about the strange violence of wanting someone who could alter your internal weather simply by existing.

She did not write about gifts.

She wrote about impact.

She wrote lines like: “He seems to me equal to gods…” and then confessed how her voice failed, how fire ran under her skin.

She did something radical.

She told the truth about love as an experience inside the nervous system — not as an event on a calendar.

And for centuries, love remained like that.

Private. Dangerous. Transformative.

It wasn’t until much later, in medieval England, that love became attached to a date.

A poet named Geoffrey Chaucer, in the 14th century, casually mentioned Saint Valentine’s Day in a poem, linking it to the season when birds chose their mates. It was not an instruction. It was an observation.

But humans, as they always do, took something symbolic and made it structural.

Over time, the day grew arms.

Letters became expected.

Then cards became mass-produced.

Then flowers became mandatory.

Then jewelry became proof.

And somewhere along the way, the meaning quietly shifted.

Love stopped being something you experienced
and became something you demonstrated.

Externally.

Visibly.

Purchasable.

The madness of Valentine’s Day did not begin with love.

It began with fear.

Fear of not showing enough.
Fear of not receiving enough.
Fear of being the only one not chosen.

And so people began to perform love.

They stood in lines.
They bought objects.
They exchanged symbols.

Not because love had deepened.

But because silence had become suspicious.

And yet, beneath all of it, the original force remains unchanged.

Love is not the rose.

It is the reason you noticed the rose.

Love is not the card.

It is the reason someone’s handwriting matters to you more than the words themselves.

Love is not the dinner reservation.

It is the quiet moment across the table when nothing needs to be said, and nothing needs to be proven.

Love was never meant to be efficient.

It was never meant to be visible to everyone.

It was meant to be felt.

Internally.

Disruptively.

Unmistakably.

Sappho understood that.

She didn’t ask anyone to buy anything.

She simply documented what happened when the human heart encountered something it could not control.

And that is the part we must remember.

Valentine’s Day does not belong to corporations.

It belongs to anyone who has ever felt their internal world rearranged by the presence of another.

It belongs to the friend who stayed during your darkest year.

It belongs to the stranger who treated you with unexpected kindness.

It belongs to the version of yourself who survived and learned how to remain open anyway.

It belongs to the quiet courage of still being capable of warmth in a world that often rewards indifference.

Love was never meant to be loud.

It was meant to be precise.

It was meant to be rare enough to notice.

And real enough that it didn’t need witnesses.

Before the cards.

Before the roses.

Before the spectacle.

There was simply a person, on an island, trying to explain why their hands were shaking.

That is where Valentine’s Day truly began.

Not in the store.

In the nervous system.