Feel the Love!

For the second Valentine's Day running, my husband ordered flowers to be delivered to me at work, and the florist didn't show. Last year they called me at work about 6:30pm to say they were running behind, and would just deliver to me at home later in the evening - eventually arriving close to 10.

You'd think a professional in the business of marketing love tokens would have a better understanding of basic human psychology!

Courtship is as at least as much about territoriality as it is about love. The wife, brainwashed by years of Hallmark card commercials and Lifetime Movie Network, thinks her husband sends flowers as a gesture of devotion. But he does it primarily to demonstrate her unavailability to her male coworkers.

Not to notify them of his existence, mind you. Unless his wife is, quite frankly, a bit of a skeaze, her close male coworkers are probably already aware that she's spoken for. No, the purpose of the ostentatious display of flowers at the woman's workplace is to let her coworkers know that the man in her life is involved, that he's a presence, that he's a force to be reckoned with. That he's paying attention, basically.

Listen, what I'm trying to get across here is that if you want to save a chunk of change, you should just drive to your wife's office and mark her cubicle walls with urine. It's not quite as civilized as flowers, but the intent and the effect are pretty much the same.

It's hard to be a hopeless romantic in this day and age, but I manage, I manage.