The holiday of love is finally here and along with the celebration comes the annual rush to shop for your significant other.

This year, I also find myself gearing up to make my partner’s Valentine’s Day as special as can be. Shopping for birthdays and Christmas? Easy. Valentine’s Day? I’ve found that I’m out of my league.

Throughout many weeks of extensive gift research, I’ve been left asking myself, why are our tokens of love being gendered?

I admit to falling for the gender specific gift assortments with my frantic Google and TikTok searches of “Valentine’s Day gift ideas for boyfriends.” However, I expected flowers to be a given, along with the usual card. Yet, it’s the one gift idea I’ve received the most pushback on.

Gender stereotypes are nothing new; we’ve grown up with them along with the discourse of how gender norms fall within relationships. While some ideas being debated are fairly recent – like check splitting – men gifting flowers to women has become traditional, likely due to the association of flowers and femininity.

So yes, I expected the older generations to frown at my plans of giving my boyfriend a beautiful bouquet of roses, but it’s disappointing how the stigma towards buying men flowers is alive and well amongst the youth of Generation Z. A recent survey by YouGov finds “members of Gen Z are more likely to display ‘toxic masculinity’ than older men.” So, does the issue lie in men not wanting the bouquet?

Sure, with the boom of gym culture and terms like “alpha male” being popularized, it can be easy to see how the notion of rejecting anything nearing fragility is being strengthened. This may result in anxieties for their significant others from giving them the flowers at all, in an attempt to avoid any offense.

The most frequent pushback I’ve heard while asking some of my male peers about their stance is that they don’t see the point in receiving flowers when they can get an actual useful gift instead. But to this I ask, what do you think women do with them?

Ultimately, life is too short and we’re drastically overthinking things. Flowers are simply beautiful. They’re symbols of romance and friendship. Politics and buzzwords aside, it’s an expression of love. Isn’t that what the whole day is about?

While I’m a firm believer in gifting flowers on any random day, this Valentine’s Day can be a perfect event to get the special man in your life a bouquet of flowers picked out just for them. The flowers themselves don’t last forever, but the feeling of love and appreciation that comes with receiving them does, and everyone deserves that feeling.

You can also get creative; personalizing the bouquet is an easy way to get it just right. One popular craft flooding my TikTok feed is adding Pokémon cards to the bouquet or adding items picturing their favorite characters.

It’s embracing small acts like these that will allow our generation to transcend past these boring stereotypes and finally end the stigma of men receiving flowers. The act of gifting flower bouquets brightens up our surroundings each Valentine’s Day, and it’s time to bring the men we love into the fun.