Making the Case for Full-Chalance: Telling People You Love Them and Gifting Flowers

The way I feel about flowers has emboldened my ideas on expressing love.

For years, I’d carried myself with a kind of tepidness that betrayed honesty in favor of a desire to be sure. I refrained from telling people I’d loved them when I did out of fear it would cement something I didn’t want to accept (or give, for that matter). I had once thought my style was just one that aligned with more subtlety- the kind you hope that coincides with a slow burn- but in reality, prolongs opportunity, regardless of whether it was the outcome I’d wanted. I loathed the idea of being caught doing too much. AsI I’ve gotten older, it’s more obvious to me what we rob ourselves of when we fixate on internal battles designed to bleed our souls dry. When we postulate on how much caring is too much vs. too little, where does our humanity go?

One of my absolute favorite books, “Dear Sugar”, by Cheryl Strayed, features a letter addressed to its presiding advice columnist that laments over this topic. Specifically, the letter details this sense of dread over saying ‘I love you’ to a new partner because its sender associates his uttering of it with a previously failed marriage. If he were to tell her he loved her, was he also bound for a trajectory eclipsed by his past?

In response, Sugar counters his hesitation with the below:

“You get to define the terms of your life. You get to negotiate and articulate the complexities and contradictions of your feelings for this woman. ” (Strayed 32)

She not only implores the reader to set his own barometer of what loving someone means, but poses a preview of a cultural aftermath: “Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel.” (Strayed 33)

For all my precautions in the name of certainty, I’ve realized what it has meant to deprive myself of emoting loudly, loving loudly, and the risk of looking silly being its own reward.

There is irony in these parallels laden before me because I’m in the business of letting it be known how you feel about other people in every context. How curious (and beautiful) is it that in its universal symbolism that the gifting of flowers have persisted throughout time? In a culture that is very much nonchalant and holds little room for analog, it remains a gesture almost akin to handwritten letters because it need not be grandiose for the message to be received in full. Yet, its an inherently high-production thing to do. Whether its picking up a potted orchid from the grocery store or ordering a hand-tied bouquet, much is conveyed in all the steps that make it happen. As the thought sequence goes- “So you were thinking about me.”

To gift flowers is a poetic experience for whoever receives them. They are living snapshots of nature at a given point time, allowing its recipient to bear witness to its beauty as well as its gradual decay. You know you’ll only have it for so long, and therein lies its appeal: the ritual of placing them in your home, remembering why they’re there, and how they endure even so.

Likewise, one of love’s most vexing components is that it can be fleeting. Like a bud that blooms only to decompose within a week, and when seasonal offerings dwindle until the next year—the temporality of florals is both its greatest draw and morose tragedy. And yet, such phenomena are still worth marveling over, again and again.

I experience micro-doses of this often; when I’m en route to a destination, vase in hand, and a stranger stops to comment on how fragrant lilies are wafting throughout the air, however many feet away. Or when I’m scrolling past tens of photos of the same floral arrangements in my camera roll with minute differentiations because the sunlight had grazed a ranunculus a particular way. And when my friends go out of their way to gift a bouquet to me, fully aware of what it is I do - a liminal spark emits every time because I know what every observation and gesture surrounding flowers means. To express with them in tow is to signal that there is beauty here to pause for and relish in. For every sentiment, I can still find hundreds more, and they still don’t waver in value no matter how many times im presented with them. They will never dull my senses, if only to heighten them when i seek out reminders for what it is that I enjoy about this craft.

If we are the amalgamation of everyone that has loved us, then everything I’ve ever felt for someone else also lends itself to texturizing the entire experience when putting together a floral arrangement. It’s a scale ultimately comprised of these varied interactions that have made my life so lush, as I’m thinking about those who have something to celebrate, those who are no longer here with us, those who might be eagerly awaiting a reply, and those who may not love them back.