The Origins of Valentine's Day

• This article was first published in 2017. It has been updated.

Valentine’s Day is upon us again. It’s a time of candlelit dinners, heart-shaped candy boxes from the drugstore and (depending on your relationship status) watching old romantic comedies while you drink wine by yourself.

It’s a great celebration. But where did it come from? And why do we care about it so much?

People have been trying to answer those questions for a long time. The New York Times pondered the day’s origin in 1853 but called it “one of those mysterious historical or antiquarian problems which are doomed never to be solved.”

Well, it’s 2023 so we’re going to try again. Here is a brief guide to some of the major Valentine’s Day theories, from ancient Rome to the present.

It could have been a Roman Bacchanal.

The most common explanation for how Valentine’s Day came to be is the ancient festival of Lupercalia, a raucous, wine-fueled fertility rite in which Roman men and women paired off. This theory has appeared in news articles for decades.

Lupercalia was celebrated for centuries in the middle of February and eventually, as the Roman Empire became less pagan and more Christian, was transformed into a celebration honoring St. Valentine.

Noel Lenski, a Yale historian, told National Public Radio in 2011 that the festival was known for its debauchery and nudity until Pope Gelasius I made it a Christian holiday in the fifth century.

“It was a little more of a drunken revel, but the Christians put clothes back on it,” Mr. Lenski said. “That didn’t stop it from being a day of fertility and love.”

There is little reliable information about the life of St. Valentine. The Times reported in 1923 that the day may in fact celebrate two different saints named Valentine who were made into a composite character. (Neither one of them sounded particularly romantic.)