My husband goes to the grocery store and walks right past the flowers. A small bunch can cost $5. I have told him that would be enough. In the last year, he hasn’t brought me flowers once.
That sounds like a very small thing to put beside the words ‘I’m leaving my husband.’ I know how it sounds. But I have spent our relationship asking for something simple, hearing that he understands, and waiting for him to do it.
Occasionally, he has bought flowers for our anniversary, or for my birthday if I’m lucky. What I keep asking for is a bunch on an ordinary day, without a date on the calendar reminding him. I want the small surprise of knowing he thought of me while he was out.
I haven’t kept this wish to myself. We have sat down and written out what we each want from our relationship. Flowers are always on my list. There have also been arguments with screaming and crying, and times when I have threatened to leave. This has gone far beyond a hint he might reasonably have missed.
Each time, he says he understands what it means to me. He promises to change and do better. That promise gives me something to hope for, until nothing happens again. After enough repetitions, I’m left with both the missing gesture and the memory of being told it would come.
A colleague of his told us that he buys his wife flowers every week and arranges them himself. I’m not asking my husband to copy that routine. Once a month or so would mean something to me. But hearing about that couple made my own request feel even less extraordinary.
Money isn’t the obstacle. I don’t need an expensive arrangement, and I have said so. Neither does it seem to require a special trip: he runs errands without me and regularly goes grocery shopping. From where I stand, the opportunity is already there. I can’t understand why the flowers never make it home.
The explanation I keep coming back to is that I’m simply not important enough to him. That is how it feels, rather than something I can prove about what goes on in his head. He says he understands; I’m trying to make sense of how that can be true while this keeps happening.
There are other ways I have felt unappreciated over the years. I can’t honestly put the whole marriage inside a bunch of flowers, or pretend this is the only thing that has hurt me. It is the detail that sticks, though, because I can name what I wanted and remember asking for it so clearly.
I’m saying I want to leave. I have said it in arguments before, and his promises haven’t led to the change I asked for. What I still find myself wondering is whether I could have looked past the other things if, every now and then, he had simply come home with flowers.
