“Will you be my valentine?”

“Will you be my valentine?”

This would be the most used sentence today. May be you have already used it and if unfortunate (or fortunate, depends on how you see it) you may be planning to use it again. The problem for the male section of the society is that they are a little too many as compared to the female section. At the last count there were 3,169,122,000 males as compared to 3,132,342,000 females making the gender ratio to be 101 in favour (I am not sure of the favour part atleast on the Valentine’s day) of males. Thus by simple calculation we see that 1 guy stands to lose for a potential gain of 100 guys.

And I am happy including myself in the category of these few individuals who choose to ‘lose’ so that some 100 others can ‘gain’. I being much of an introvert, in the traditional sense of the term, do not want to use this sentence. On this day I literally celebrate the SAD part.

Time for a little history.
Lovers and the greeting card industry may have Geoffrey Chaucer to thank for the holiday that warms the coldest month. Although reference books abound with mentions of Roman festivals from which Valentine's Day may derive, Jack B. Oruch has shown that no evidence supports these connections and that Chaucer was probably the first to link the saint's day with the custom of choosing sweethearts. No such link has been found before the writings of Chaucer and several literary contemporaries who also mention it, but after them the association becomes widespread. It seems likely that Chaucer, the most imaginative of the group, invented it. The fullest and perhaps earliest description of the Valentine's Day tradition occurs in Chaucer's Parlement of Foules, composed around 1380, which takes place “on Seynt Valentynes day,/Whan every foul cometh there to chese [choose] his make [mate].”

Talking about the greeting card industry, the world's largest greeting card maker, Hallmark Cards Inc., has for the first time analyzed individual cities' data for top-selling Valentines, and it yielded a surprising result. Researchers at the Kansas City-based company expected the choices of customers to be as different as the cities they call home. But it turned out V330-5, one of the thousands of options Hallmark offered last Valentine's Day, was the top choice of consumers in New York and Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Miami, and virtually every other city.