i hate red roses

for years, i genuinely believed i was difficult to love.

not because anyone explicitly said it all the time, although sometimes they did, but because women are conditioned early to believe disappointment is a character flaw.

especially when someone technically did the “right thing.”

he bought the flowers.
he showed up.
he apologized.
he tried.
what more could you possibly want?

and every single time i looked at those red roses, i felt this awful hollowness in my chest that i could never properly explain.

because i did not ever want the roses.
i wanted to feel known.

but there is something deeply lonely about being handed the exact thing the world told someone women are supposed to want instead of the thing you actually love.

red roses always felt performative to me.
too loud.
too rehearsed.
too attached to obligation.

they arrived after damage.
after distance.
after forgetting.
after betrayal.
after guilt.

they never arrived simply because someone saw something beautiful and thought of me gently.

and somehow, instead of questioning that sadness, i questioned myself.

maybe i was spoiled.
maybe i expected too much.
maybe i was just one of those women impossible to satisfy.

because that is what women do, isn’t it?
we internalize emotional neglect as personal failure.

i remember trying to force gratitude.
trying to convince myself the flowers should matter more than the energy attached to them.

because technically, flowers are flowers.
technically, love is love.
technically, effort is effort.

except it is not.

because love without attentiveness eventually starts feeling like obligation in expensive wrapping paper.

and i hate red roses.

i hate what they came to symbolize for me:
love offered after harm instead of before it.
gestures replacing intimacy.
being studied only once someone feared losing you.
being called “hard to please” simply because you wanted tenderness that felt intentional instead of performative.

i love white roses.

quietly.
deeply.
completely.

there is something about them that feels honest to me.

they do not scream for attention.
they do not demand romance.
they simply exist beautifully.

they belong at weddings.
funerals.
births.
hospital rooms.
celebrations.
goodbyes.

they survive every version of womanhood.

and maybe that is why i love them so much.

because i have spent years surviving every version of myself too.

the teenage girl called too much.
the young woman desperate to be chosen correctly.
the wife trying to make loneliness feel normal.
the mother.
the career woman.
the exhausted woman.
the grieving woman.
the woman rebuilding herself quietly while still pretending she is okay.

all of her would have chosen white roses.

softness.
simplicity.
purity.
truth.

not because they are trendy or aesthetic or more elegant.

but because they feel like love given without performance.

and for the first time in my life, i understand this now:

it was never about the flowers.

it was about how devastating it feels to spend years asking to be known softly by someone who only memorized you during moments of crisis.

because the right love notices.
the right love remembers.
the right love studies your softness before it is in danger of losing it.

and now, without reminding, without shrinking myself, without translating my needs into something more digestible.

i will forever receive white roses.

not because i finally became easier to love.

but because i finally understood i was never asking for too much in the first place.