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February 09, 2022 - Image 14

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The Michigan Daily

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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!

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