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On her way to becoming a June bride, many a young lass was favored by her lover who, upon finding an appropriate tree, used its trunk as a canvas on which to carve their initials inside a heart (replaced today by a text message and a photoshopped emoji).

It wasn’t an accurate rendition of a heart, of course. Drawing an anatomically-correct one would have taken a young beau hours. And since a real heart looks about as romantic as a weasel, no would-be bride would find her passion stirring unless she were also stalking Stephen King.

Romance demanded a romantic-looking heart.

But that doesn’t explain why the heart of romance (and the occasional royal flush) bears as much resemblance to a real heart as Donald Trump does to Sir Walter Raleigh. There is, however, a book that does. Not just any book.

The book that was the heart.

From our earliest days, we humans have described our lives using metaphors. Today, it’s the computer. We talk about not having enough bandwidth to handle our work load. We look for life hacks. When a hack goes awry we try have to debug it.

As early as 400 AD, the the metaphor of choice was a new technology called writing.

“Classical authors like Aristotle pictured memory as a scroll or wax writing tablet … and the Bible refers to a ‘tablet of the heart,’” according to Eric Jager, professor of English at UCLA.* For centuries thereafter the Bible’s authority kept the heart at the center of book metaphors.

“Sermons and poems liken[ed] the heart to a book where the believer writes God’s commands or where Christ writes the story of his own Passion,” Jager wrote. “[Even] today we commonly speak of written records, though generally forgetting that ‘record’ derives from the Latin word for heart (cor).”**

(Jager must not have a sweet tooth. He overlooked those small heart-shaped sugar candies called Sweethearts, the ones with “Be Mine”, “Kiss Me”, “Call Me”, “Let’s Get Busy”, or “Miss You” inscribed on each one.)

Writing about the heart as a book was easy. But illustrating or painting a heart, that was a challenge. There was very little imagery to draw upon.

The Church that placed such importance on the heart also discouraged the cutting open of human bodies, dead or alive. Few people had ever seen a human heart.

Who knew what one looked like?

In The Shape of the Heart, Pierre Vinkin speculated that medieval artists attempted to visualize the heart based on the writings of one of the early chroniclers of medicine and anatomy, the Greek physician Galen, who wrote the Canon of medicine (circa 100 AD).

“Greek texts were studied, translated, and disseminated by the Byzantines and Arabs,” wrote Vinken. “Galen’s works became the basis of all teaching and investigation until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”

Galen described the heart’s shape as an upside down pine cone.

(For that we can thank Aristotle. He’d never seen a human heart but he extrapolated his knowledge of bird hearts into a human heart with a pine cone shape. As a dead white man, his words were given extra weight.)

The shape we now know as the iconic heart showed in various paintings and illustrations, although not always as a pine cone.

Sometimes, the heart was represented by a pear, pear leaf or ivy leaf, all of which had the same, general pine cone shape.

The first known instance of [the pinecone/pear/ivy shape referencing the human heart] appears in “Le roman de la poire” (“Romance of the pear”), a French love tale dating back to 1250 AD, in which a man and his lover peel a pear together with their teeth.

Jager found the rounded, symmetrical form of the heart — the one we see today on playing cards and valentines — appearing as early as 1330. “After about 1450 heart-shaped images proliferated in both religious and secular art,” he wrote.

By the sixteenth century the heart’s real shape was well known, yet its iconic shape persisted in all but scientific representations. Blame that on a phenomenon essayist Nicholson Baker called “iconographic inertia,” which Jager described as, “The tendency of obsolete technologies to remain alive … as symbols, images, or metaphors.”***

So feel free to stock up on sale-priced Valentines Day cards and overstock bargains on Sweetheart candies. That romantic heart shape will be as fresh next year as its been for centuries (the candy is another matter).

All because of a mistake that was literally for the birds.