A Valentine to the Corinthians

A popular Valentine’s Day tradition is to ask, “Who was St. Valentine, anyway?” Turns out, the answer is approximately, “Just some guy.”
To be more accurate, he was a martyr (all three of them), which sets him up as an exemplar to the Christian faithful. What this has to do with romance, I have no idea, but there he sits at the edge of the party along the wall, like a relative you felt obliged to invite but have no idea what to do with.
Occasionally, someone will feel compelled to acknowledge the titular religious overtones, and looking about, settles on 1 Corinthians 13:1-7. What a lovely passage, even appropriate for a secular setting, right?
No, and not necessarily appropriate for Valentine’s Day, either. Over at Confessing Evangelical, John H reminds us, “that this is not a cuddly ‘hymn to love’, but was instead aimed directly at the Corinthians’ chief failings as expanded on elsewhere in the letter.” As The Reverend Prebendary Dick Lucas explains in a sermon:

These verses are frequently interpreted without reference to the Corinthian believers, as though Paul is attempting an unapplied analysis of love, breaking it down into its constituent parts, as an essayist might do . . . But this ‘anatomy of love’ is addressed, with scrupulous care and precise application, to the church at Corinth.

(emphasis in original)
As edifying as Paul’s epistle lesson might be to modern Christians, it has about as much to do with Valentine’s Day as, well, St. Valentine.
And the reason is obvious: English has only one word for love. Greek, on the other hand, has four well-known ones: storge (affection), philia (friendship), eros (romance), and agape (divine love). Valentine’s Day is almost exclusively about eros, whereas 1 Corinthians 13 is talking about agape. Without that textual distinction, the passage lends itself to misinterpretation.
Must we insist on a strict interpretation? Of course, married (or engaged) couples rely on agape in their divine union, so to some extent the passage is appropriate for today (or weddings).
Otherwise, I can only recall one place in the Bible that indulges eros, the Song of Solomon (um, NSFW?), a book we tell Sunday school students is ‘only for mommies and daddies.’
Then again, I always did think it telling that the Song of Solomon is prefaced by Ecclesiastes.