Love is a pure and vulnerable form, one that admits itself to others. Like a personality, it can be oblivious and unassuming, confident, and other times, blunt or angry. It reflects those who stand in front of it, and gathers distant strangers into a shared image. It’s an experience you want to savor, and in everyday life, you’ll see pure glimpses of love at work through meaningful gifts, compliments, and hugs. Sometimes, love is sadness, empathy, or happiness; it’s an unrestricted spirit, and the basis of our emotions. Nothing can wholly describe what love is, but the shape of a heart has become a universal symbol of what love can be.
According to Ideas Ted, Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle considered the heart to be the supreme center of human emotion and thought. The organ’s primacy would establish it as the ruler of love, a feeling that was not yet fully understood at the time. In later years, the early interplay between the heart and love would deepen with the Ancient Romans, who believed that a vein in the fourth finger extended directly to the heart. Though anatomically incorrect, it gave rise to the “ring finger,” which endures in the world even today. Millions of people wear their wedding rings on the fourth finger, a modern continuation of one of the earliest traditional beliefs of love and the heart.
The first widely recognized heart shape originated nearly 700 years ago, as documented in the Gaulden Monuments. In 1344, a French medieval picture book known as “The Romance of Alexander” marked the debut of the iconic heart shape with two lobes and a point, a shape that is still in worldwide use today. In the image, a woman raises a heart, which appears to have been taken out of the man she faces. To her left, the man holds a hand over his breast, guarding his hollow chest and vulnerability to the woman.
Love is enlivened by the pulse of our hearts. It’s a beat that never stops, but runs alongside a rhythm unique to its beholder. Maybe the thumping of the heart, like a stubborn child pounding against a locked door, is love trying to get out. Even behind closed doors, it slithers out as a smile, the creases of eyes slanting upward, and as a tenderness scared to show itself. Love is the kind of nakedness that leaves your being and heart bare. It exposes every unfettered piece of you: shame, longing, trust, and an authenticity that makes you defenseless, but open.
For centuries, humans have searched for a way to express love. This Valentine’s Day, look for how love makes its way out of you. Words may fail to describe love, but the heart won’t. The heart’s symbol of love is older than Valentine’s Day itself, one that draws on the beautiful intersection of biology, culture, and emotion. During an open-heart surgery, you and your heart are revealed. Rather than setting free the love that lives in and bangs on your heart, surgeons do all they can to keep your heart thumping. Love is a rushing flow, but it can’t leave its innermost home—the heart—through the work of others. Only you can let it out. Don’t let your loved ones endure subtlety. Instead, express your love, and let your heart be seen in a shape unique to you.
