Florist Gump

I love my girlfriend, but the other night on the phone, I said something that really hurt her feelings. I was out with my guy friends, and one said, "Get her flowers. Girls love that stuff." I ran around in the middle of the night looking for them. Obviously, there were no florists open. I had to hit a slew of 7-Elevens. I came home with a rose and told her about my treasure hunt to find it. She loved it, and all was forgiven. For a flower? I don't get it.

--Temporary Jerk

It is a little crazy that when you love a woman, you're supposed to express it with a handful of useless weeds -- that is, "Say it with flowers" and not something nice and practical, a la "Say it with a repeating stapler." "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," wrote Gertrude Stein. Sorry, Gertie. It's actually not. A rose can also be a form of information -- one that anthropologists call a "costly signal." A costly signal is a message that's more than just words -- meaning it involves an investment of time, effort, risk, and/or money, which tells the recipient that it's more likely to be sincere. So, the pointless extravagance of buying a woman flowers is exactly the point. To be willing to burn money on something so intrinsically useless suggests you're either a natural-born idiot or so in love that it makes you droolingly dim. But -- as you might argue -- you only spent a few bucks on that rose. Well, context counts. Research by evolutionary social psychologist Yohsuke Ohtsubo and his colleagues points out that buying just one flower will make you look cheap -- but only when "a more costly option (is) available" (like if you're at a florist). Otherwise, effort counts. In other words, if you only bring your woman a single rose, casually mention that you got it by crawling over broken glass to 7-Eleven while dodging gunfire from the Albanian mob. (Or that you at least tried Rite Aid, CVS, and 12 other 7-Elevens first.)