These came home with The Gentleman yesterday. (The inside of the card says: “and I can imagine some pretty awesome shit”)
It’s not a special date or anything (our anniversary is 10/12). He just stopped at the store for onions, saw roses, and those came home too, with a card.
He is particularly sweet to know that a) I do really like flowers. A lot. A whole lot. But also b) words of affirmation are really important to me, so the card, especially as there’s a note inside, will probably get saved forever.
He and I met in 2005 or so, playing Vanilla WoW on Feathermoon-US. That was before I was married to my now-ex-husband, and before he’d even met his now-ex-wife. We met in person a few times over the years, at server meetups, and stayed connected on Facebook.
In 2019, we ran into each other purely by accident in WoW Classic, which led me back to WoW Retail, and then… a few months later we were talking every day, texting all the time, playing games together again all the time. One Sunday afternoon we had a conversation that went like this:
Me: “Hey, are you flirting with me?
Gentleman: “Yes, I hope that’s okay.”
Me: “Oh good, because I’m flirting with you too.”
And that was the end of that. I flew to rural NV to see him about six weeks later, and then continued to do so every 4-6 weeks until COVID.
At one point in one of those situations, the subject of gifts came up, and how I was used to buying gifts for myself, because my ex never got me anything I didn’t pick out on my own. Nor had I ever gotten flowers. A few weeks later, between trips, I got a knock on my door, and the following was there:
The note inside said:
“Please accept these amputated plant genitalia as a token of my love and affection.”
I was, and am, very smitten with him. COVID made life hard for us, but in December of 2020, he moved to Texas to be with me. In March of 2021, we signed a lease on a house, and as of April 1, we now live together (with his two kids, which … oof, sometimes, but he (and they!) are so worth it).
Flowers are kind of a cheesy gift sometimes, or they get pooh poohed a lot. But I really like flowers. I’ve bought flowers for myself for years, because I *love* the difference they make in my house to have them there. I’ve long maintained that with the exception of an obviously mourning/funeral bouquet, there’s no such thing as “bad flowers” (okay, except flowers that will kill my cats, but that’s not the flowers’ fault).
I am, though, very lucky. I get told “I love you” in lots and lots of ways. Some of that is that I choose to listen with more than just my ears, but some of that is having a partner who goes out of their way to say it, every day, in so many different languages.