Why Do Girls Like Flowers?

Despite a valiant push by Christmas in recent years, Valentine's Day remains everyone's favorite made up holiday. While it lacks Christmas's genius capitalistic hook (you buy people stuff, for Jesus), Valentine's Day is particularly despicable because it uses humans' one fatal flaw against them: Love. War and hatred may seem the most damning flaws in the human condition, but there is nothing more irrational or  more dangerous than a man, driven by the blinding chemical reaction we call love, to impress the object of his affections.

Valentine's Day takes love, that drive that has ruined so many great people, and puts it to the test. How much do you love someone? You had best get the correct number of chocolates, or else you'll suffer a humiliating defeat of being unable to correctly express your love through capital. While love punishes universally and indiscriminately, the encumbrance of Saint Valentine's great test falls solely on the male gender.

Due to Valentine's Day's dubious historical precedent, the reasoning behind the male's duties in preparation for February 14th remains murky at best. Regardless, any man unfortunate enough to find himself in a relationship in a week's time will be faced with the prospect of purchasing a bundle of the most manifestly incomprehensible gift imaginable: Flowers.

How flowers came to be the standard-bearing gift in human romantic interaction is not particularly clear. I envision a single instance, eons ago, of a well-meaning Homo habilis uprooting a handful of daffodils, intending to cook the petals into a prehistoric stew of some kind. But upon gleefully presenting them to his new bride, he was shocked to see them placed in vessel of water, rather than in the bubbling cauldron for which they were meant. However, he noted the improved disposition of said new bride, and did what any partially evolved guy would do:

He rolled with it.

In doing so, he damned his descendants to repeat his mistaken victory in horrendous pantomime for all eternity.

Ignoring any and all potential chronologic/scientific/historical inaccuracies in the above anecdote, the fact remains that come Valentine's Day, there will be flowers. While the history of gifted flowers is vague, the contemporary world offers many clues to the tradition's continued existence. Through 24 years of first-hand research with the female gender, I have intuited the reasoning behind women's desire for flowers:

1. Flowers are pretty.
2. Flowers look nice.
3. Flowers are pleasant to look at.

These explanations offer precious insight for the oblivious minds of the men obligated to purchase flowers as an offering of love. However, being a male myself, I must say that despite this 3-step rationale, I am still confounded by the female desire for flowers, and have arranged my problems associated with the exchange of money for earthly flora in a similar 3-step format:

1. They are going to die in, like, three days.
2. When they die, they're going to wilt and make the water in that vase really nasty.
3. Seriously, they're only going to last three days.

Perhaps it is the temporally sensitive nature of flowers' beauty that makes them so beloved amongst the female gender. This forced rarity would inevitably increase the value of the short time spent within eyesight of a bouquet, but this explanation falls apart when met with a masculine analogue.

A human male would surely refuse the emotional burden of a gift (perhaps a new comic book) that would be his to lovingly appreciate for about a week before its inevitable withering death; a process though which it would somehow produce a dish that he would have to hand-wash because it won't really fit in a dishwasher. Why women would so gratefully accept this strain is beyond the understanding of those cursed with a Y chromosome.

It is this inherent incomprehensibility that makes flowers so maddening to the men who must procure them for their significant other on the fictional holiday of Valentine's Day. But on a day "about" love, perhaps women are the objects of male doting because their adoration of terminally extant flowers shows that they, not men, truly understand that it is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.

Of course, anyone who has loved and lost knows that saying is total bullshit.