By Theresa Rézeau
Valentine’s Day did not begin with romance.It began with a man executed for believing love was worth disobedience.
The figure we now call Saint Valentine enters history not as a poet of desire but as a priest who defied imperial law. According to tradition, he continued to bless unions forbidden by the state, insisting that love could not be legislated out of existence. For this refusal, he was imprisoned and executed. He was beheaded or clubbed - accounts vary, as they do for the two or three Valentines martyred under Claudius II around 269–270 AD- but the charge was the same: performing forbidden marriages, healing in Christ’s name, and refusing to bow to empire’s ban on Christian unions. Love, at its origin, was not decorative. It was illegal. It carried consequence. It required courage.
Over centuries, that defiant love softened. Martyrdom gave way to metaphor. Resistance was replaced by roses. Valentine’s Day became a festival of reassurance - that love is safe, mutual, affirming, and ultimately rewarding. And yet, beneath the gloss, the older question remains, quietly unanswered: what does love cost when it is taken seriously? This is the question art remembers when culture forgets.
Modern images of love tend to promise completion - two halves becoming whole, desire resolving into harmony. But history, and honest experience, tell another story. Love, when entered fully, does not guarantee wholeness. It exposes. It unsettles. It asks us to relinquish control over who we thought we were.
Few artists understood this more clearly than Edvard Munch.
In The Kiss (1897), two figures lean into one another in a darkened interior. Their bodies are close, yet their faces dissolve into a single blurred form. Identity collapses. Boundaries soften. Even the room seems to close in. The colours bleed into one another; what should be two mouths meeting becomes almost a single wound of light. This is not the theatrical embrace of romance, but something quieter, heavier, and more ambiguous.
Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944), The Kiss (1897)
Oil on Canvas
Public Domain
Munch does not paint love as fulfilment. He paints it as risk.
To love, in this image, is to allow oneself to be altered - perhaps diminished, perhaps absorbed. Something must give way. The self does not remain intact. There is tenderness here, but it is shadowed. Love is not performed for an audience; it happens behind closed doors, where identity itself becomes vulnerable.
This vision is closer to Valentine’s origins than we might like to admit. Love, in its earliest telling, was never safe. It defied authority. It unsettled order. It did not promise happiness - only fidelity to what one believed to be true.
Or consider Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, where divine love arrives not as comfort but as piercing- a rapture indistinguishable from agony, a wound that does not close.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598 – 1680), Ecstasy of Saint Teresa ( 1647–1652)
Marble
Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome
Public Domain . Photo by Alvesgaspar.
Even here, in the language of sanctity, love enters the body as something that overwhelms, transforms, and costs.
As beautiful as love is, we rarely ask the harder question. What about the broken hearts? Where do they go?
Valentine’s Day has no language for them. No ritual. No shelter. The day moves forward as if love either succeeds or disappears, as if grief were a private failure rather than a shared human condition. We celebrate beginnings, unions, reconciliations. We do not linger with aftermath.
Art does.
In Munch’s painting, love does not end cleanly. It remains unresolved, heavy, interior. The figures cling not because they are whole, but because separation threatens erasure. The broken heart does not exit the scene. It stays within the body, shaping posture, shadow, and silence.
Perhaps broken hearts do not go anywhere at all.Perhaps they remain - folded into us - becoming the quiet weight by which we learn how to love more carefully, or not at all.
Have you noticed what happens to some people after love breaks them?
Not everyone recovers. Some hearts do not heal cleanly; they withdraw. They become cautious, narrowed, guarded. Love is no longer approached as possibility, but as threat. These are not people who love less. They are people who have loved once too fully. We rarely speak about them on Valentine’s Day.
We do not ask what happens to those who survive love by refusing it ever again - those who choose safety over exposure, who decide that the cost of intimacy is simply too high. Fear, here, is not weakness. It is memory.
To have one’s heart broken is to learn something irreversible: that love can undo us, that closeness can erase, that devotion can leave us unrecognisable to ourselves. For some, this knowledge does not deepen tenderness. It hardens into distance. And yet, this too is a form of fidelity - a fidelity to survival.
What we often mistake for emotional failure is, in fact, a form of quiet intelligence. The heart that withdraws after breaking is not always refusing love; it is learning the cost of exposure. It remembers what it felt like to be undone, to be altered beyond recognition, to carry another’s absence as a permanent interior presence. This memory is not weakness. It is knowledge acquired at a price.
There are lives shaped not by repeated heartbreak, but by a single, decisive one - a love that went too deep, lasted too long, or asked too much. After such encounters, love is no longer abstract. It is embodied. It is remembered in the nervous system, in posture, in hesitation. Desire does not disappear, but it becomes cautious, reverent, even fearful — as if approaching something sacred and dangerous at once.
Valentine’s Day has little patience for this kind of aftermath. It prefers renewal narratives: love again, try again, open again. But the human soul does not always move on command. Some hearts pause for years. Some never reopen fully. Others reopen partially, conditionally, with gates and safeguards in place. These are not refusals of love; they are negotiations with survival.
In this sense, heartbreak is not merely emotional loss. It is a threshold experience. It reveals something fundamental: that love is not an accessory to life, but one of its most destabilising forces. To love deeply is to risk being reconfigured by it. And not everyone emerges from that reconfiguration intact.
This is why the language of “starting over” so often rings hollow. There is no return to a former self after love has been taken seriously. The heart that loved once does not reset. It carries forward what it has learned - sometimes as tenderness, sometimes as restraint, sometimes as silence. What looks like withdrawal may, in fact, be a form of ethical discernment: a refusal to offer the self cheaply after it has once been given without reserve.
In other lives, love is not even permitted to begin - displaced entirely by marriages arranged before desire, consent, or selfhood have time to form, leaving no language for heartbreak because love itself was never allowed to exist.
It is often said that when a heart is broken, one must receive a new heart. The phrase sounds hopeful, even merciful. But how does such a thing happen?
A heart is not renewed by forgetting. Nor is it replaced by willpower. A heart is not an object we discard. It is a history. It carries memory, attachment, fear, hope - the accumulated weight of having once opened fully to another.
In spiritual traditions, a new heart is not given in exchange for the old one, but through it - through its breaking, its exposure, its surrender. What is renewed is not innocence, but capacity. Not escape, but openness. Not erasure, but a heart made vulnerable where stone once held.
Munch understands this economy of transformation. In The Kiss, the figures do not stand whole before love. They lean into one another carrying what has already been fractured. Love does not shield them from loss; it asks them to remain present within it.
Perhaps the spiritual work of heartbreak is not repair, but yielding - not restoration to what we were before, but consent to what we are becoming: altered, marked, and yet still capable of presence.
A new heart, then, is not a replacement. It is a heart that has learned how to stay open without denying its wounds.
History remembers many who loved too much, but not always because their love was excessive. Sometimes it was simply incompatible with the structures meant to contain it.
A quieter modern parable can be found in the story of Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend. Their love was not undone by lack of feeling, but by obligation. To be together would have required Margaret to relinquish her royal status, her income, her public role. Love was offered a price - and that price was total erasure of self. She chose duty. He withdrew.
What remains most striking is not the romance itself, but its aftermath. Decades later, when they met again in old age, the air between them still carried the unsaid - a sense, noted by those close to her, that something essential had never been recovered. The loss was not replaced. It became a lifelong shadow, carried rather than resolved. This was not love that failed. It was love that could not be lived without annihilation.
Valentine’s Day has no space for this kind of love -love that remains faithful without fulfilment, love that survives by renunciation rather than union. And yet, it is precisely this kind of love that reveals how costly love can be when taken seriously.
Perhaps this is where the divine enters the conversation - not as a deus ex machina to erase the fracture, but as the presence that descends into it. In many sacred traditions, love is not revealed through protection from suffering, but through accompaniment within it: a refusal of abandonment. Human love cracks open the self; something larger enters through the crack - not to seal it shut, but to make the opening enduring.
So carry the wounds, if you must. They are not proof of failure.They are the map of what love has dared to ask - and what you, in your fragile way, have answered.
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