Today on Dydd Santes Dwynwen I surprised my partner with a hand-made greeting card to mark our relationship (approaching 25 years and counting!). It’s a partnership that has always been based on the rock-solid foundation of true love – by which I don’t mean all the false/self-deluded/fleeting distortions of that much-abused word, such as possessive love, trophy love, parental love, peer-pressure love, teenage love, sexual love, manipulative love, performative love, narcissistic love and materialistic love. For me, nobody has defined love better than radical Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing (1927-1989) in his brilliant 1967 book The Politics of Experience: “Love is letting the other be, with affection and concern”.

January 25th is the feast day of St Dwynwen, the Welsh patron saint of lovers. Dwynwen was a 5th century Welsh princess, a daughter of Brychan Brycheiniog, king of the Bannau Brycheiniog area. According to ancient legend Brychan refused to let Dwynwen marry Maelon, the man she loved, because he had promised her to someone else. Heartbroken Dwynwen became a nun and retreated to Ynys Llanddwyn, a tidal island off the coast of Ynys Môn, where she established a convent and lived a life of piety praying for God to look after all lovers. When she died (c460) she was buried on Llanddwyn. It became a place of pilgrimage, particularly for young lovers, and gradually her feast day became recognised in the Welsh calendar as a day to celebrate romance.

Every year St Dwynwen’s Day becomes more popular in Wales, as an expression of our unique identity as well as a rejection of the tacky, commercialised English/British equivalent St Valentine’s Day (There are 11 St Valentine’s in Catholic Encyclopedias – the February 14th one, in some versions, was supposedly a 3rd century Christian martyr from today’s central Italy and was originally introduced into the British Isles by the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages).

Regardless, the message to my funny valentine must be: Dydd Santes Dwynwen Hapus!

Video: YouTube