A Love Letter to Transparency and Communication

Ahhhh…Valentine’s Day!  A celebration of love!  

So how did Valentine’s Day come about, and what does this happiest of holidays have to do with hard business?  Well, as it turns out, a lot!  This isn't another article on the inflation-adjusted cost of flowers or comparing same-store sales of candy hearts at Walmart.  It’s not about flowers and lace-cut cards. It’s about the marriage, not the honeymoon.

So let’s skip the Leo Buscaglia version of Valentine’s and go full Dr. Ruth Westheimer:  today represents relationships. Relationships aren’t lovey-dovey fairytales, they are hard. The Latin origin of Valentine, “Valentinus,” actually means “worthy” or “powerful,” not romance. It’s only when love is mutual do you form the strongest relationships and “love,” as any internet-educated shrink will tell you, is only sustained through “transparency,” making it a core operating system for the relationship.

And this goes for companies as well as people.

Why Relationships Mattered Then

But before we talk further on relationships, let’s get back to today and how it came to be. As it turns out, no record connecting “Love” and “Relationships” with Valentine’s Day exists prior Chaucer’s “Parliament of Foules” poem from around 1375. In it, Chaucer connects love to the St. Valentine’s feast day (February 14) when all animals, including business executives, come together to find a mate.

So why then was St Valentine the focus of Chaucer’s romantic prose? And why today?  Well, as with many pleasant holidays, the origins are less palatable. Valentine’s Day actually has somewhat obscene and violent origins which have been mercifully euphonized over the years into flowers, cards, and chocolate bon bons. In addition to Chaucer’s connection, our contemporary $24 billion love-fest actually has a two-part origin story: 1) Lupercalia, an ancient pagan debauchery festival and 2) a pope co-opting the calendar to immortalize a more pious event: the tragic beheading of St. Valentine.

Let’s start with debauchery, which is always more fun than a beheading. Lupercalia was the oldest of Roman festivals, commemorating the origin of Rome in 753 BC where Rome’s founding twins, Romulus and Remus, were apparently nursed by a wolf in a cave. The cave, called “Lupercal”, also happened to be where Romans believed that Mars, the God of War, impregnated the twins' mother on February 15th. Naturally, the Romans, as Romans liked to do, used it as a way to promote sex.

The Romans decided to annually celebrate fertility at the site where eventually priests would sacrifice a goat and a dog, smear blood on men’s foreheads and have them prance around laughing and naked, while smacking random women with their new goatskin thongs. Move over NRF, those Romans knew how to party.

Men would then draw a woman’s name and stay with them throughout the festival and sometimes until the following year’s festival. Some naturally fell in love and married, or made a conscious decision to keep a bird in hand instead of potentially drawing the short stick in next year’s gala. Over the eons, though, Lupercalia dropped the romance and the women pairing and just retained whipping. And it got serious. Sometimes the men’s self-flagellation on “Valentine’s Day” would even end in death proving some humorous metaphors write themselves.

Fast forward to February 14th year of our Lord 270. Three centuries and one world-rocking crucifixion later, the Roman Emperor Claudius II Gothicus had banned marriage hoping men would be more willing to go to war when a Roman named Valentine began aiding persecuted Christians and secretly marrying them. Valentine’s conversion to Catholicism had inspired him to defy Claudius and landed him in jail.

During imprisonment, he then tried to convert Claudius to Christianity and when he refused to forsake his faith, Valentine was beheaded. We don’t know if the association of red with the holiday is from that, (I’m hoping not) but if you want to complete the picture in your mind, the flower-adorned skull of St. Valentine is on display in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome. Assumedly the only flowers associated with Valentine’s day way back then were the ones in poor ole Valentine’s autonomous skull.

By the 5th century, flogging didn’t seem like so much fun and Lupercalia was ripe for assimilation. Although some small trace of reverence for naked men prancing around and smacking women with leather thongs was probably still buried deep in the DNA of every pure-blooded Roman, Pope Gelasius co-opted the date and set February 14 to honor Saint Valentine’s martyrdom instead.

Why Relationships Matter (More Than Ever) Now

So, nice history but other than Claudius reminding us each of some former manager, what is the tie between today’s hearts and flowers and today’s business world? 

Well again, in short, it’s about relationships, and relationships in business are hard. On the personal level, employees grapple with office politics, balancing life issues and careers, and so on. On the organization level, B2B and B2C relationships are always precarious and shifting.

One thing is sure, regardless of whether personal or organizational, when relationships are missing love, they become more transactional, less energized, less interesting and less predictable. Conflicts, power struggles, misunderstandings and secrecy drain positive energy from the partnership.