Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday.

It's almost Valentine's Day and I've been wondering why are heart shapes not, uh, heart-shaped. Like this is an illustration of a heart and this is not an illustration of a heart on any level, except that if you ask people to draw a heart, they will almost inevitably draw this. "How did this happen?" is a question I found so interesting that I ended up reading one book and many websites. There are four prevailing theories. I'm going to go through them in what is my opinion most likely to least likely, beginning with the Smiley Face Theorem.

So this does not look like a human heart, right? But it is red, like a human heart, and kind of blobby, like a human heart, and we often simplify images, right? Think about the smiley face. The smiley face does not look like a human face and yet we all recognize that it represents a human face. And this theory becomes even more likely when you consider that most humans back in the day didn't see a lot of human hearts, but they did see a lot of other hearts like cow hearts and sheep hearts and goat hearts, and those actually do look not quite heart-shaped, but like on the road. And doctors and anatomists in Afro-Eurasia have been drawing hearts that look approximately like the Valentine's heart for like almost a thousand years, so I think that's the most likely possibility, but it is also the least interesting which is a common problem when it comes to solving historical mysteries and also other mysteries.

By the way, the human heart has been associated with love for a very long time, like Sappho's mad heart was quaking with love some 2,700 years ago. And that makes a kind of sense, right? Because the heart kind of flutters and beats more pronouncedly in times of love and or longing, but associating this particular shape with love is much newer. We only have evidence of heart-shaped love dating back maybe 700 years as in this illustration of a woman giving her literal heart to her lover.

Then there's another older possibility: The Libyan Conjecture. So in Ancient Afro-Eurasia, people highly valued the heart-shaped seeds of the silphium plant, which was kind of a giant fennel that grew in Libya. Silphium seeds were a huge deal, like Pliny the Elder called them one of the most precious gifts presented to us by nature and also noted that unlike most medicinal herbs, it didn't make you fart. Silphium was used to treat stomach aches and fevers, but critically for our purposes, it was also associated with sex and romantic love because it was used as contraception. And silphium was so valuable to the people of Libya, then known as Cyrene, that they minted it on their coins and it looked like this. So it's possible that this image was associated with romantic love and then over thousands of years, conflated with the human heart which was also associated with romantic love.

Third, there is the possibility that the heart shape derives from a different plant or decorative origin. Like some fig leaves are heart-shaped, as is ivy which has long been associated with fidelity because, you know, it sticks to everything. Like, for instance, we don't know the meaning, if any, for most decorative designs used in the Indus Valley Civilization, but they were using heart shapes. People in ancient Japan also used heart shapes, although it appears that it's unrelated to romantic love. Still, it's possible that people saw heart shapes and associated them with love and the heart rather than the other way around—people seeing the heart and associating it with a heart shape.

Lastly, there is this possibility: The heart shape does not really look like a human heart, but it does kind of look like either breasts or buttocks. Like the heart shape is a little bit, to use contemporary parlance, "stacked" and we do associate love with human bodies a lot of the time. Some have argued that this is no coincidence that the shape was originally associated with lust and longing and love, and then over time, came to be associated with the heart because the heart was seen as the the seat of emotion. Which it isn't of course. While your heart may flutter when you see your crush, the seat of that emotion is not actually in your heart, right? It's in your brain. I mean insofar as it even has a seat, but your heart does not actually sink when you get terrible news; It just feels as if your heart is sinking. It's a simile. Your heart does not actually break when you are heartbroken; It feels like your heart is breaking. And your heart is not especially full when you're feeling love. It's a metaphor.

And so in the end, the heart shape is not actually a symbol for the heart. It's a symbol for how we feel in our deepest depths when we experience loving and being loved. It could look different. We could imagine love is existing in the spleen or in an aura that's just outside of ourselves and then we would have a different metaphor, a different shape. But I'm glad that we have the shape that we do—not because it's perfect or because it looks like a human heart—but because it's a shorthand that we can all share that helps us to understand each other, which is what language and emojis are about in the end. 

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.