I admit it, as far as Valentine’s Day goes, I’ve always been a pretty big cynic (not regarding love, of which I am an enormous admirer to say the least). This year I resolve to give the day its due, in word and deed at least. I have to say that a holiday celebrating love is probably one of the best (if not the best) ideas ever imagined. I’d like to think that every person has at least once in their lives experienced that near-inexplicable glow inside one’s being that can literally warm a physical body on a cold February day (or any other day of the year).

In fact just witnessing a couple in love can have a profound affect. I–one of the luckiest men alive–and my bride were on vacation in Palm Springs one year and were at a purely nondescript, unromantic eatery (I swear to you it was a sports bar, if memory serves) and an older couple, perhaps in their seventies, walked over as they were leaving and leaned in to tell us that they were so inspired to see the way my wife and I talked, leaning across the table, holding hands, and that it reminded them of how they were decades before. That, however, was not what they really wanted to share:

It was that they still felt the same way all those many years later.

Love is a real thing, people, and when it strikes you down there is really no use fighting against it. Of course we should celebrate it more than once a year (excepting the allowance of corporations and their insufferable greed to but one 24-hour period to milk us all dry).

The history of Valentine’s Day, not many know, was not not connected to amorous celebrations until the time of Geoffrey Chaucer and something called “courtly love”, which means to express love in a manner of courtship by bestowing upon those who are loved gifts of flowers, song, wine—and these days perhaps an i-gadget or two. Perhaps it is fitting that Chaucer is the first to be buried in “Poets’ Corner” in Westminster Abbey. I’d say anyone associated with the celebration of love (and its eventual commencement into a recognized holiday around most of the world) deserves such recognition (to the fact that he also has an asteroid and lunar crater named for him I cannot comment but to think possibly that love and all its romanticism over the years has forever been associated with the moon and stars).

I’ve come to a point in my life where I see love much more differently than I did as a boy (I’m only 48 so I still classify myself as a “young man”—just not as young as some others). The oldest of sayings I remember are of love making the world go ’round, and while the study of Physics may have put that one to rest, I doubt there’s a soul who believes the world as a whole would not be a better place with exponentially more love and less hate.

The one element of Valentine’s Day to which I’ve never paid much attention is Cupid. Kind of an innocent image, I suppose, a chubby, winged lad with a bow who fires arrows to the heart. I was more of a Greek mythology guy and Eros is the closest cousin to Classical mythology’s Cupid. Both characters received their armory later in the telling of their respective legends, and also (much like the rest of us) seemed to put on weight over the centuries (Eros was originally a lithe, stunning creature, which in my opinion might have held up the legend of love more appropriately).

So let the celebrations (and dinners, chocolates, flowers, candied hearts, Hallmark cards, dancing, kissing, groping, etc.) begin. And if your revelry takes you past midnight, into the 15th (and if your date becomes neither a pumpkin or a vampire—excluding activities where either are welcomed), don’t worry.

Love doesn’t wait for nor die after a date on the calender. It answers to no timetable nor to any human being’s whim, but rather ravages the world in its own time and of its own accord. You cannot bottle it; you can’t press your hands against it and stop it as if it were a person trying to assault you; it is an elixir for which there is no substitute, a feeling without equal.

So, when you find it, no matter how futile it may seem (and is), do everything within your power to never let it leave.

Happy, happy Valentine’s Day, my good friends, fellow writers, readers, and virtual connections. May you love, be loved, and always remember that love really does make a difference regardless from which angle you gaze.