It Actually Is About the Flowers

This Valentine’s Day I had an evening date planned with someone I had been seeing for a while. We laughed and talked about our favourite movies, our favourite music. We had shared playlists. He asked me about my favourite flowers.

As the weighty romantic date crept closer, a creeping unease took hold of me. I ran in refuge to the url of one of my favourite florists and pre-ordered myself a large bouquet of natives. Waratahs, sprawling gum, prickly banksia. Something unruly, coarse and bright. Something textural, pungent, excessive.

I have always felt like my desire for flowers was a kind of personal inconvenience.

Flowers are costly and fleeting. Flowers serve no real function beyond inviting a small riot of nature into your home so it can slowly wilt on the kitchen bench. They are, by any practical standards, a terrible investment.

I have always loved the bloody things.

The trouble is that loving flowers reveals something about a person. It suggests you might be constitutionally inclined toward symbolism. Toward poetry. Toward finding meaning in small gestures that are, objectively speaking, quite impractical.

For most of my life, I have treated this temperament like a liability. A decorative weakness. The sort of thing you quietly manage so you can appear more reasonable than you actually are. (Sometimes this performance feels like a full-time job.)

This year, I bought myself the flowers because I suspected that part of me would have to be privately maintained.

I didn’t quite trust that the man I was seeing would recognise it. And I worried that if I confessed my desire for flowers it would sound indulgent. Needy. Theatrical. (To be fair, all words that could be used to describe me…)

Asking for flowers can feel like asking someone to participate in your internal mythology. Not everyone will be interested in that kind of labour.

For those playing at home, when the date came around, he didn’t bring the flowers.

In fact, he never gave me flowers.

And I realised, slowly, that it wasn’t about the object itself. It was about whether someone could see that particular architecture inside me. The part that soaks up the symbolism of ordinary things. The part that believes gestures should sometimes exist without a clear purpose.

A flower does nothing. That is precisely the point.

It is a small and temporary ceremony. A reminder that beauty can be summoned briefly, admired intensely, and then allowed to fade. No productivity. No permanence. Just presence.

People who do not share this temperament tend to find it slightly baffling. They prefer objects that last. Objects that solve problems. Objects with a receipt and a warranty.

But some of us are built differently.

Some of us want the fleeting thing. The unnecessary thing. The small acknowledgement that life itself is a futile and miraculous performance.

A flower is a kind of shorthand for that.

I used to think this made me difficult to love. Too symbolic. Too romantic. Too suffocated by the unnecessary poetry of ordinary life.

As if the real task were learning to want less.

For a long time, I believed that. I thought maturity meant sanding down the symbolic edges of myself. Becoming someone who did not require gestures that were brief, beautiful, and largely useless.

But I’m starting to suspect the opposite might be true.

Perhaps the real work is not finding someone who will occasionally buy you flowers. Perhaps the work is making peace with the fact that you are a person for whom the flowers were never really optional.

For some of us, it is something beyond sentimentality. Something that is woven deep into the fabric of our character - A kind of orientation that we can learn to honour instead of whittle away or rally against.

Once you accept that about yourself, something softens. You stop apologising for the way you are moved by small symbols. You stop trying to make your longings more sensible.

You simply place the flowers in water.

Let them reach. Let them bloom. And let them fade.