Send your boyfriend/husband flowers. Randomly, just because.

Yeah, I know, it sounds unmasculine or whatever. But hear me out.

We guys are used to doing a lot of the heavy lifting in relationships. Most of the time, we ask you out. We plan dates. We send flowers/chocolates. We love coming up with thoughtful ways to show our affection to you. And it makes us feel all manly when we see the smile it puts on your faces. It’s an active role vs a passive role.

But.

While we’re used to giving these kinds of affectionate things, they don’t necessarily come back to us in equal measure. Call it gender roles or sexism or whatever you want, but it’s still something we deal with.  I send flowers and chocolates and food left and right when I’m dating someone, but I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve been given a small random gift by an ex, and each time it made me smile for days.  We still have the same emotional needs as you, the same desire to feel loved — we’re just socialized not to show it. Which means that when we do get affectionate gifts like that it means so, so much more to us. This link says it well: When he can finally let go of the crank he continually turns day after day in order to earn love and, even if only for a moment, it turns by itself to nourish him in return, that is when he will know he is loved.

And flowers, in our culture, are one of the purest expressions of love you can give us. They’re not a practical object. They’re not something he’ll have to put effort into to enjoy, like car parts or a new grill. Their only function is to brighten his day. They say “I love you, I want you (and everyone around you) to know I love you, and you deserve to sit back and see beauty in your life.” What man would not love that?

It’s not just me who has this opinion. I’m on this rant because of my visit to a friend in Dresden the other day. She’s in a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend, and she was telling me that she missed him. I made the flowers suggestion, which threw her for a loop.

A girl send a guy flowers? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Guys don’t get flowers. What if he’s embarrassed by them? What if his co-workers make fun of him?

So I explained her the above, and then brought up the topic when we were eating dinner with her two other male friends. Their reactions were the same: “I would be shocked, but in a good way. It’s an amazingly thoughtful gift — and that never happens to me.”

So she did it. We sat on the couch next to each other and ordered flowers. I sent mine to my Mom, because Mother’s Day is the most important day of the year for her, and she called up a flower shop in Switzerland and arranged for a bouquet to be sent to her boyfriend’s work.

And they arrived today. The secretary called him in from the field to pick them up. He loved them, she said: “[He told me] That it was one of the nicest gifts he’s ever gotten, made his day, and all co-workers were jealous. So basically I am the best girlfriend EVER.”

I can only imagine the smile on that guy’s face. He’d been apart from the most beautiful thing in his life for a month, and likely wouldn’t see her for a few months more. And now he had something pretty to remind him of what he would be coming back to.

Send your guy flowers. Trust me on this one.