ILLUSTRATION BY JENNIE VANG

PAGE LAYOUT BY SARAH CHUNG

VINTAGE VALENTINE CREDIT: Bentley Historical Library

Wednesday, February 9, 2022 // The Statement — 2

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

BY JULIA VERKLAN MALONEY, 

STATEMENT DEPUTY EDITOR

Can’t Buy 
Me Love
Can’t Buy 
Me Love

What is love? Scientists explain it in terms of 

the body’s release of adrenaline, dopamine and 
serotonin; cynics refute its existence by citing 
ancient philosophy. The Greeks had six words 
to describe it, whereas Merriam Webster offers 
a simple definition. More recently, a Hallmark 
card asserted that love is when you find “the 
sprinkled donut in a sea of glazed.” 

Whatever it may be, the complexity of “love” 

opens the arena for many interpretations and 
ways of expression. It is an intangible feeling 
that we seek to materialize through tangible 
exchanges, much like how our desire to consume 
is expressed via the transaction of paper money. 

Therefore, “punny” cards depicting talking 

donuts, a cherub with a quiver of arrows and cen-
turies of heart-shaped anything are the expected 
form of currency when transacting love come 
Feb. 14 — a currency made of paper, measured in 
chocolate and scented like a rose. 

 It has been over a millennium since Feb. 14 

was formally recognized for a martyred Catholic 
priest and an estimated 545 years since the earli-
est surviving valentine was sent to its lovestruck 
recipient. 

Love — whatever it means — has been 

expressed since the dawn of time, with paper 
love notes serving as a common source. Love 
is a feeling, a drive; a motivator, a risk. Love is 
everything that you can feel yet everything you 
can’t touch. Hence, there is one designated day 
each year that gives us the chance to materialize 
said feeling, where valentines attempt to express 
their “eros” using Cupid as their guide. Under his 
direction, the currency of love has maintained 
its medium of paper, creased with a crisp cen-
terfold, patterned with a red filigree design and 
sealed with a kiss. 

Valentine’s Day became popular in the U.S. 

during the 1840s, when increased paper produc-
tion and the proliferation of the printing press 
allowed for pre-printed notes featuring iconic 
love birds, bright red hearts and our favorite “god 
of love.” Specifically, Esther Howland is accred-
ited with making Valentine’s Day a business after 
transforming her stationary art into a monopo-
listic essential for American lovers. Put simply: 
Love went commercial. 

Howland sold many of her creations for the 

high price of 75 cents (the equivalent of $100 
today), embossing each note with her signa-
ture “H.” Howland’s work was an artistic, tan-
gible symbol of love and an early example of the 
importance of branding in shaping social and 
cultural trends. 

Early cards often featured short greetings and 

poems that juxtaposed playful flirtation with 
biting humor. Luxury cards, like Howland’s, fea-
tured wafered paper pressed to mimic lace, over-
laid with precious gold foil and colored paper 
cutouts. They were intricate pieces of art, art that 
required much creative thought and intention — 
and all of an average American’s daily salary. 

For the superfluous valentine, though, hand-

made cards highlighted the sentimentality of the 
sender, saving pennies while creating a spark. To 
some, a man who can write his own poem was 
more wooing than one who can simply open his 
wallet. 

To explore the historic commodification 

of love and its place in popular culture, I spoke 
with Dr. Elizabeth White Nelson, University of 
Nevada, Las Vegas professor and cultural his-
torian of 19th century America. Her research 
supports that romantic relationships of the 19th 
century were characterized by a focus on eco-
nomics — valentines serving as a “broker.” The 
trading of cards was a testament of wealth and 
devotion, recording fraught issues of love and 
marriage on paper. 

And while the circulation of cards may have 

been born out of pure, heart-beating inten-
tions by entrepreneurs like Howland, they soon 
became a symbol of status. After all, middle-class 
women of the 19th and 20th centuries had to 
consider the relationship between romantic love 
and the economic reality; the alternative of mar-
riage being work in factories or mills. The holiday 
was a way to test the viability of said reality, using 
heart-shaped materialism as a measurement of 
future stability. The currency of love was a cur-
rency for survival, a notion that may have stuck. 

Now, Valentine’s Day marks the main day of 

the year in which singles and couples alike sub-
ject themselves to both cupid’s arrow and the 
card aisle, using materialism to mimic stability in 
both a financial and emotional lens. 145 million 

cards travel from hand to hand every year and a 
mere $21.8 billion dollars is projected to be spent 
on gifts this Feb. 14. Red roses are the staple flow-
er in every bouquet order, heart-shaped boxes of 
chocolate are an ancient aphrodisiac that can’t 
stay on the shelves — each gift accompanied with 
a love note. 

Talking avocados, cartoon cats and sexual 

innuendos make up many card designs nowa-
days, supplementing long-held romantic motifs 
with evolving visual fads. Yet to Dr. White Nel-
son, while the material symbols of love may have 
lost some sophistication, “we are still struggling 
with love in the same way.” 

The evolution of card exchange is an ever-

changing quest for materializing love, a never-
ending haste to commodify a feeling. Hence, 
shifts in romantic, socio-cultural trends caused 
by reduced disposable income levels and the 
deconstruction of heteronormativity reveal 
that the true underpinnings of Valentine’s Day 
and the act of giving cards may have never been 
about love in the first place. Instead, it is about 
defining comfort within a relationship through 
an element of tangible risk; a risk of love and a 
relationship hidden behind the front of a mis-
chievous cupid or talking donut. A risk not need-
ed solely between a man and a woman or under 
a sizeable budget. 

This risk is partly what inspired Dr. White 

Nelson’s research: “you’ll find someone who has 
a charming and lovely valentine story, but most 
Valentine’s stories are of heartbreak and fear and 
concern and disdain for the holiday as insincere.” 
This is likely because “we feel both drawn to the 
idea that goods can speak for us and uncomfort-
able with the idea that we don’t control them.” 

Cards can therefore be viewed as an invita-

tion to romantic love, an invitation that has the 
opportunity to be declined or embraced. While 
cards may not in essence be an all-encompassing 
embodiment of love, they are in fact a currency 
of it. A currency that is difficult to standardize — 
something that has been grappled with for cen-
turies. 

Ann Arbor, at one point rated one of the coun-

try’s most romantic cities, has hosted count-
less card exchanges and budding relationships, 

spreading love throughout campus and within 
the lecture halls. 

Archived within the Bentley Historical 

Library are scrapbooks featuring students’ paper 
love, dating from the early 1900s onward. Many 
feature rosy-cheeked cupid, others: cartoon sil-
verware. 

Yet, cards were not always the premier mode 

of Valentine’s gift-giving on campus. In fact, the 
1939 Valentine’s Day edition of The Michigan 
Daily touted love notes as a “stale” form of “com-
mercialized sentimentality,” suggesting instead 
a $2 horse-drawn tour around Washtenaw coun-
ty. The 1951 edition cited “decreasing money and 
decreasing chivalry” as the cause of lessened 
card exchanges, two years later stating that 
“people with enemies are more likely to receive 
[valentines] than people with friends.” 

Pre-made cards with lackluster poems were 

no longer causing a spark. If not a card, what is 
the way to our hearts? 

The 1987 edition advertised a heart-shaped 

pizza from the Brown Jug and a couples getaway 
to the Bahamas with the ingenious tagline “A 
day in the library? Or a day in paradise?” By 2022 
standards, Kay Jewelers claims a lab-created 
pink opal heart ring is the perfect gift, presented 
with a card depicting hugging blocks of cheese 
with the caption “Will you brie my valentine?” 

Such evolution in gift-giving, ranging from 

spiteful valentines to romantic cheese, exposes 
the varying, and somewhat comical, generation-
al attempts in pinpointing the materialization 
of love — something seen within our own city. 
There is no return to the “good old days” where 
love spread with sincerity, unaffected by capi-
talism or social demands; history provides cor-
roboration. Despite subtle changes in gift-giving 
or card circulation, what remains constant is the 
tangible risks of expressing love coupled with the 
reliance on shops and card aisles to commercial-
ize sentimentality. As a result, business execu-
tives and card designers are (and have always 
been) sticking their noses in our romantic busi-
ness. Gross! 

