That February 14th is Valentine’s Day has been well known in our culture for many decades. On this day, postcards, flowers, sweets, dinners, trips, and a multitude of other gifts abound, fueled by commercial ingenuity, as incentives for a long-standing custom that has become a social trend. However, this is a holiday with elements from different traditions and eras.

On one hand, within the Christian sphere, the memory of Saint Valentine is evoked. This priest, who served in Rome during the 3rd century under the reign of Claudius II, was defied by Valentine. This emperor, who for reasons of military expediency had decided to prohibit marriage between young people, continued to secretly marry lovers. After being imprisoned and martyred, he was finally executed on this day in the year 270. To honor this saint, between 496 and 498, Pope Gelasius established his liturgical feast day on this very date.

Similarly, this popular commemoration evokes collective customs established many centuries before Christianity: some argue that its origins indirectly trace back to pre-Roman pagan festivals celebrating fertility. In more recent times, such as the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the mid-15th century, social practices of exchanging gifts and love letters also emerged in Great Britain and France. North Americans, in turn, adopted this custom in the early 18th century, increasing it over the last two centuries until it became deeply rooted in its current form.

However, at the heart of all this historical blending lies the undeniable everyday reality of love, which—with the gentle breath of its missteps, its comings and goings, its hopes and its doubts—drives daily life. It is the irrepressible tendency to exist in another person in order to feel whole and, in the words of Francisco Umbral (1932-2007), “to release [thus] the anguished feeling that life slips away without its riches reaching our hearts.”

In his intimate novel *If We Had Known That’s What Love Was*, this author presents, with lyrical tenderness, a lucid vision of a love story between two young students who, due to their ignorance of the true nature of that feeling, distrust their own relationship. Alongside these protagonists, the narrator—one of the most original, innovative, relevant, and prolific prose writers in contemporary Hispanic literature, in whom literature and existence merge—by interweaving his own moments of reflection into the narrative, becomes another character in a context whose very everyday insecurity reveals the real presence of love.

Because what is at stake is nothing more and nothing less than that substance which lovers “give to one another through common words, fleeting glances, through the complex and accessory network of presence, movement, and social life.” Therefore, “when one or both of them try to isolate that fluid, to reduce it to itself, discarding what gets in the way, which is the life around them, the fluid may evaporate, since it lives and thrives precisely in the flow of all things.” Hence, there is always “less love in a love scene than in any other scene between those same two lovers.”

This is a good conclusion to keep in mind on today’s holiday. Merchants owe a great deal to its celebration. But the economy as a whole owes even more to the irreplaceable, anonymous love of everyday life—and its constant generation of wealth—for with it, millions of people move the world forward in a generous act of giving, recognition, and gratitude to the loved one. Or even simply in remembrance… The same love with which—according to Umbral—one fulfills one’s ideal self: “to know oneself reduced [by the beauty of the nonexistent] to the bare line of possible human perfection,” in which “no one is as pure as when remembered with love.”

Pedro Paricio. Give me three minutes