Bygone old romantic customs like we should bring back.

The best gift you can give your girlfriend on Valentine’s Day is reading poetry out loud

“How to Make a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, which addresses questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Create a Happy Life.

No holiday exposes gift-giving issues like Valentine’s Day. On birthdays or Christmas, you can at least get some variety. But on February 14, almost everything on offer is painfully conventional and threatens to degrade the quality of your love. To paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

How can I love you? Let me count the ways.
I love you as much as $59.99 in flowers bought over the internet.
And like stopping at CVS for chocolate on the way from work.
(Tomorrow my love for you will be halved, so I can get more than that.)

If that poem leaves you cold (as you fear those gifts will leave your Valentine), then real poetry might just do the trick. Poetry, however, is practically synonymous with romance, describing the lifelong experience of love. For a truly personal touch—something you won’t find on a shelf—reading poetry to your loved one can turn a boring holiday into a performance of your love.

Reading others is a rare practice nowadays. At this point, I’m probably a voice in your head, because most reading these days—books, magazines, news, email, and social media posts—is done in silence. Occasionally you might read something to another person, but unless you’re a teacher or parent of young children, you probably haven’t read to others on a regular basis since college or grade school.

Private reading is a fairly modern practice. In ancient times, when literacy was rare, it was common to read aloud to others. St. Augustine saw his teacher Ambrose’s habit of silently reading to himself as a kind of eccentricity, noting, “His eye shone upon the pages, and his heart searched for sense, but he There was peace in his voice and language.” He speculated that Ambrose may have done this to preserve his voice. Now you will see a couple at the breakfast table quietly reading two copies of the same newspaper instead of each other. Thus the written word loses its relational potential.

There is a certain intimate magic to being read to by someone you love, and scholars are starting to understand why. They find, for example, that reading to children can have a powerful positive effect on bonding. Levels of oxytocin, often called the “love hormone” because of the strong feelings it seems to engender between family members and friends, have been found to rise in children when they are told stories. Oxytocin is especially powerful at bonding lovers together. Although no research I have found addresses the question directly, it is logical to assume that reading to your beloved may raise oxytocin levels, thus deepening the romantic bond.

This reading is best done at night, as sleep approaches. Scholars have found that listening to thoughts before bed results in better recall than listening during the day — so if you want your sweetheart to remember that your love is “like a red, red rose,” when I tell them It’s better to say it. Moreover, people can form associations even while they sleep. For example, researchers in Israel played a tone to sleepers when a certain smell was emitted, and found that participants still expected that smell when the sound was heard during their waking hours. Depending on what you read, you can probably make a strong connection between the feeling of love and the music of your voice.

To maximize the effect, try two more things. First, read poetry, which evokes emotional experiences in unique ways. As researchers reported in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience in 2017, poetry can activate your brain’s nucleus accumbens, which is associated with the chills you get—the sudden pleasant feelings you get.
Second, hold your partner’s hand while reading. As scholars from Brigham Young University and the University of Utah showed in 2008, holding hands can calm many of the body’s stress-sensitive systems. Other research suggests that under certain circumstances, holding hands can lead to brain-to-brain coupling, a phenomenon in which people match each other’s neural activity while speaking and understanding each other. . “Two hearts beat as one” is a common metaphor for romantic love, but it might be more literal—if somewhat less poetic—to say that “two time lobes beat in parallel at a frequency of three to eight hertz. Take action.” This neural similarity creates an intimate feeling of being in tune with another person—the feeling that helped you fall in love in the first place.

To maximize the effect, try two more things. First, read poetry, which evokes emotional experiences in unique ways. As researchers reported in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience in 2017, poetry can activate your brain’s nucleus accumbens, which is associated with the chills you get—the sudden pleasant feelings you get.

Second, hold your partner’s hand while reading. As scholars from Brigham Young University and the University of Utah showed in 2008, holding hands can calm many of the body’s stress-sensitive systems. Other research suggests that under certain circumstances, holding hands can lead to brain-to-brain coupling, a phenomenon in which people match each other’s neural activity while speaking and understanding each other. . “Two hearts beat as one” is a common metaphor for romantic love, but it might be more literal—if somewhat less poetic—to say that “two time lobes beat in parallel at a frequency of three to eight hertz. Take action.” This neural similarity creates an intimate feeling of being in tune with another person—the feeling that helped you fall in love in the first place.

Put all the science together, and you’ll arrive at the perfect Valentine’s Day gift: read love poetry while holding your partner’s hand until they fall asleep. It requires no money, no trips to the store, no reservations. You don’t even have to get creative and write your own love poems. Trust only the big guys.

The best Valentine’s Day poem depends on the characteristics of your relationship. Let’s say, for example, that your love is an inscrutable mystery, beyond the power of words to express. An example from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda would be:

I don’t love you like you’re a rose of salt, Topaz,
Or carnation arrows that spread fire:
I love you like someone loves something vague,
Stealth, between shadow and spirit.

If your love is divine, holy and pure, look to the Bible. You can try this song:

Look, you are beautiful, my love.
Look, you are beautiful.
Your eyes are doves.

If your love is almost unbearably intense, I recommend the works of Edna St. Vincent Melley, who wrote “When I Too Long Have Looked Upon Your Face”:

I turn away from your light in despair.
And standing indifferent, a mind gone,
A stupid, surprising thing out of sight
By looking at the sun for a long time.

And if the object of your affection is a hot mess? (The advice comes from my wife; no doubt she’s asking for a friend.) I can appreciate here the libretto of Igor Stravinsky’s 1951 opera The Rich Progress, where the heroine, the beloved Anne Trulove, sings a nighttime lullaby to her lover. Crazy” – Tom Rickwell:

Slowly, little boat
Across the ocean
Crystal waves are splitting.
The sun in the west
going to rest.
Sail to the Blessed Isles.

Perhaps your loved one will respond as the crazy background chorus plays in Tom’s head:

What does it look like?
What a heavenly tension.
Calm troubled minds?

If your Valentine is touched by your romance sign, don’t wait until February 14th. Make it a Tuesday tradition, or nighttime routine, after you brush your teeth and before turning out the lights. There is no better gift to give your love than to make Sarah Teasdale’s words come true every night:

Oh drown me in the depths of love
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
I was swept away in the wind of your love
A taper in high winds.