Songfacts®:

• T'Pau lead singer Carol Decker wrote the songs on the Bridge of Spies album with her boyfriend, Ronnie Rogers, who was the group's guitarist. This plaintive song about a love that wasn't to be is about a real person, but it has nothing to do with the Decker/Rogers relationship. In our interview with Decker, she explained: "I wrote it about an ex of mine. We would bump into each other after we split and he'd moved on and had a nice girlfriend. We'd smile and say 'Hi,' but I was still crazy about him so I always had to hide how I felt, and be cool and casual.
  
  Sadly I read in the paper a few years later that he'd died in a motor bike accident and she was devastated for years after. They were really in love."
• In America, T'Pau is squarely in the one-hit wonder camp with their song "Heart and Soul," but in the UK, "Valentine" was one of three Top 10 hits. It was the follow-up to "China In Your Hand," which spent five weeks at #1 in the UK.
• The video was directed by Brian Grant, who was one of the most prolific music video directors of the '80s. In the clip, scenes of Carol Decker working through the relationship are intercut with scenes of a man and woman doing ballet in an interpretive style.