Every year around Feb. 14, social media users argue that greeting card companies invented Valentine's Day.
The rumor gained traction in pop culture due to a line in the 2004 film "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" in which Jim Carrey's character Joel cynically declares Valentine's Day as a holiday "invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap" (archived).
Throughout the years, the rumor circulated on social media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest and Reddit.
However, the claim that greeting card companies created Valentine's Day is false. In fact, Snopes previously debunked this rumor in 2022
That said, while evidence shows the holiday predates the existence of commercial greeting cards by centuries, historians have long debated its exact origins.
The multiple theories for how Valentine's Day started
Valentine's Day has a history shrouded in mystery.
As NPR reported in 2022, some people trace the origins of Valentine's Day to Lupercalia, a brutal fertility festival held in ancient Rome in mid-February.
However, according to Krešimir Vuković, author of the book "Wolves of Rome: The Lupercalia from Roman and Comparative Perspectives," that theory was not grounded in evidence. "The connection between the Lupercalia and Saint Valentine's day is a modern invention and relies solely on the accidental proximity of the two holidays in the modern calendar," Vuković said via email. "The Lupercalia had nothing to do with courtship or romantic pairing of couples."
He said he was unsure if anyone truly knows the origin of the romantic day, writing:
[There] was nothing like pairing men and women or exchanging love messages at the Lupercalia. The number of the Luperci [men] was much smaller than the number of the women at the celebration … The connections to the Lupercalia were invented by scholars in the 18th and 19th century to account for the romantic practices of St Valentine's day of which they did not know the origin (and I am not sure anyone does).
In an article for The Conversation, a nonprofit publisher of commentary and analysis by academics, history professor Lisa Bitel noted that other theories link the holiday's origins to the execution of two Christian martyrs named St. Valentine on Feb. 14 in the third century. (For further reading, Snopes has also explored the history and patronages of the famed saint.)
However, as Encyclopedia Britannica noted, "Valentine's Day did not come to be celebrated as a day of romance until about the 14th century."
In a book titled "America's Favorite Holidays: Candid Histories," author Bruce David Forbes wrote that many books and websites link the origin of Valentine's Day to a story about Pope Gelasius I, who served as the bishop of Rome in the A.D. 490s, "suppressing a wild Roman festival and replacing it with the celebration of Saint Valentine, a Christian martyr."
However, over the next 800 or 900 years, he added, "there is no substantial evidence of romantic couples in Europe doing anything special annually on or around February 14. If this really was the beginning of Valentine's Day, would you not expect something to have begun?"
With regard to Lupercalia, Forbes said "there is no reliable evidence that [the festival] involved a ritualized time when men drew the names of women, or that it involved the pairing of lovers."
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported in February 2023 that Jack B. Oruch, a late English professor at the University of Kansas, extensively studied Valentine's Day while researching the work of poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Oruch "was convinced that Chaucer was the source of our modern ideas about St. Valentine," the article read.
Similarly, according to Bitel, it was probably more than 1,000 years after the executions of saints named Valentine that people started associating Feb. 14 with romance. Rather, she said that connection likely surfaced when one of Chaucer's pieces "decreed the February feast of St. Valentinus to the mating of birds." Bitel continued:
It seems that, in Chaucer's day, English birds paired off to produce eggs in February. Soon, nature-minded European nobility began sending love notes during bird-mating season. For example, the French Duke of Orléans, who spent some years as a prisoner in the Tower of London, wrote to his wife in February 1415 that he was "already sick of love" (by which he meant lovesick.) And he called her his "very gentle Valentine."
Bitel also noted that the character Ophelia in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" referred to herself as Hamlet's valentine. Shakespeare wrote that play around 1600, according to Britannica.
Elizabeth Nelson, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, summarized historians' various theories for the origin of Valentine's Day via email:
There are multiple origin stories: the day birds choose their mates, honoring St. Valentine, links to the Roman festival of Lupercalia — none of them can be 'proved' in a historical way but they have been part of the popular history since the eighteenth century.
Greeting card companies popularized the holiday
While greeting card companies did not create Valentine's Day, the mass production of cards played a significant role in shaping its modern traditions.
According to Britannica, people in the 1500s were exchanging formal messages, or valentines, and by the late 1700s, they were using commercially printed cards. The first commercial valentines in the United States were printed in the mid-1800s, per the encyclopedia.
Esther Howland, known as the "Mother of the American Valentine," played a pivotal role in popularizing Valentine's Day cards in the U.S. Before her work, people in the U.S. primarily imported such cards from Europe, making them costly. But by 1849, she launched a valentine business using an assembly line to create the cards, according to a blog post by the Library of Congress. That increased their accessibility.
A 1903 issue of the New-York Tribune shows what the assembly line looked like. Also, Nancy Rosin, president of the National Valentine Collectors Association, showed examples of Howland's work in a video posted by The Huntington Library in San Marino, California:
"Neither Esther Howland nor the card companies invented Valentines Day," Rosin said via email, adding:
Valentines were imported from England and American printers created both lithographed and wood engraved Valentines as early as the 1840s in America but [Howland's] idea took hold about 1848 and so we say she popularized sending the Valentine.
In the 1910s, Hallmark started offering Valentine's Day cards, contributing to the holiday's commercial prominence.
Meanwhile, Nelson, who has researched the effects of marketing and consumerism on Valentine's Day, agreed: While companies undoubtedly capitalized on the holiday's popularity, they did not create it.
Nelson linked the celebration's rising popularity in the U.S. in the 1840s to the era's increasingly affordable and accessible ways to print paper products.
By the early 20th century, the holiday had evolved into a commercial event with businesses capitalizing on its traditions. "Hallmark has been influential in shaping the aesthetics of the valentine in the twentieth century and creating new valentines to appeal to modern celebrants," Nelson said via email.
For further reading on the history of Valentine's Day cards, The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, has produced an interactive page titled "The Heart of the Matter: A History of Valentine Cards." Also, The New York Public Library has published dozens of vintage Valentine's Day items.