My Internet Valentine's Day Experience

My experience searching for the history of Valentine’s Day using solely non-academic internet resource was an interesting one. It took some doing to completely remove the idea of credited resources from my head and write a brief essay based on facts that I have no real idea of where they are coming from or if any of them are verified by a legitimate source. After wading through several of these websites I selected a few that we thought to be at least not completely nonsensical and shared some common themes and ideas. At first I was frustrated by the lack of a concrete story of why Valentine’s Day is celebrated and blamed mostly these internet sites for not being serious sites that took time to verify the information that was posted on them. But then after reading through them some more, I noticed that the reason it was so difficult to find a concrete answer as the history of Valentine’s day is because there is no concrete answer or history as to the history of it in real life.
All of these stories have some variation of a Father Valentine and his opposition with Emperor Claudius and his eventual imprisonment. The internet and these sites themselves can’t be held responsible for a lack of solid historical information when there is no solid historical information to be found anywhere. Valentine’s Day is more of a legend or realistic tall-tale and therefore its historic content is near impossible to verify. Once I came to that conclusion the rest of my experience researching and writing the essay was more focused on keeping track of and organizing the many different variations of the story. But even with that, the fact that there are so many variations with many similar parts and events only leads to the credibility of the stories of Valentine’s Day’s history.