Valentine’s Day Blunders
So I handed a few roses to three girls on the street. Very quickly a big guy came up to me and asked if I was hitting on his girlfriend, using a lot of swear words like the Delay No More fashion brand. I explained very calmly that I had been given a huge bouquet of flowers by a random girl and was just handing them out because I couldn’t be seen with flowers at basketball practice. He did not believe me. I sarcastically gave him a rose. It escalated from there.
My top Valentine’s Day blunders, all flowers-related, in chronological order:
Guangzhou—2002
I was living in Beijing on a study abroad program and our class took a trip down to Random Factorytown, Southern China, aka the most romantic place in the world. At the time I was kinda sorta seeing this girl, by which I mean I told everyone she was my GF and she told everyone we were “just having a good time” and “making out with other guys is OK.” I’m like the Zagat guide of relationship woes.
Based on this, I decided that on Valentine’s Day I was definitely single, and my friend Steve and I thought we should get a gift for the girls in our program. Our rationale was simple: if we get every girl a gift then it is just a nice and thoughtful thing from two guys and not weird and creepy? Right? Wrong.
Steve and I delivered flowers we had meticulously chosen from a market to all of their hotel rooms with a carefully prepared speech about how we think they are nice human beings and everyone should have flowers on Valentine’s Day. This, it turned out, was a mistake.
We got four thanks-for-the-pity responses, three I-never-knew-you-guys-felt-this-way and one girl who just stared at me blankly, took the flowers, closed the door and didn’t talk to me for three months. The overarching message was either “Why did you get me flowers? This is creepy,” or “Thanks, but I just think of you as a friend.” Sigh. There was actually one girl, Dawn, who was genuinely pleased and happy and said, “Thank you so much for the friendship flowers.” And she was the only girl I actually liked, so even that backfired.
At least I learned a valuable lesson: if you get a girl flowers on Valentine’s Day to be nice, it WILL be misinterpreted. Unfortunately I forgot that in future years…
Boston—2003
This should have been an awesome Valentine’s Day, given how it started out, but things went wrong very quickly.