Ah Valentine’s Day, the perfect time to decorate our little apartment with all different shades of pink and red hearts galore. This cute little button sign was inspired by a button wreath sign I saw scrolling through Pinterest and thought, “That would be a perfect craft for Valentine’s Day”! While putting my new Valentine’s decoration up in our apartment, the history buff in me started to wonder how the heart became a symbol of love and why does this universal heart shape look different than say a human heart?

First off, thanks to TIME I found out that prior to the 13^th and 14^th centuries, the heart was used for only decorative reasons. The symbolism began to grow as romantic love began to take shape in the medieval period. The connection between love and the heart was more religious than romantic at the beginning. Eric Jager, a medieval literature professor at UCLA, said that “at that time period people thought of hearts as books of memory, a place where God’s commands are written, and feelings for the beloved were somehow written on your heart.” There were stories imagining “female saints whose hearts are said to be cut open after their death, and inside their hearts are inscriptions indicating their love for God or Jesus.”

So the heart shaped does tie back to actual hearts everyone! Even if it is a little bit of a dark history. The article later goes on to express that cardiologist Carlos Machado says that the familiar heart shape we recognize today does somewhat resemble the human heart in an echocardiograms but even more so the look of a bird or reptile heart. I highly recommend reading the whole article! The link is below.