Why Men Give Flowers (And Why It Makes Perfect Sense)

It is 16 degrees inside our office in Phrom Phong. In Bangkok. In February.

The coolers haven't stopped running since yesterday. Our accountant is at her desk in a winter jacket, surrounded on three sides by roses — not arranged roses, not finished roses, just roses, thousands of them, in buckets, in rows, with narrow pathways between them so people can move. The sound is constant: the snap of stems being cut, the rustle of wrapping paper from thirty florists working at once, the hiss of water. Four people do nothing all day but clean leaves, cut stems, and put flowers into fresh water with food. They will do this for three days straight.

This is UrbanFlowers Bangkok, three days before Valentine's Day. Twenty-two thousand roses came in one shipment. Our cold rooms are full of finished arrangements, so the whole workspace becomes the cold room instead — we drop it from 25 degrees to 15 or 16 and rent extra coolers. Everyone works in the cold. Nobody complains. There is too much to do.

On our support channels, our operators are never alone at their screens. They plan together, talk through requests, help each other handle the volume. Customers call, message, and coordinate with a level of specificity that still surprises me. "Call me, not her." "I want the iPhone placed inside the arrangement." "Can the jewellery sit next to the roses without being too obvious?" "Make sure the card is sealed." Some come in to drop off gifts they want paired with the flowers, to check the arrangement in person, to make final adjustments. It is one of the more human parts of what we do — being trusted with the details of something that really matters to someone.

The overwhelming majority of these customers are men.

We close orders on the 13th. We don't fulfil Valentine's Day orders on the 14th itself. Not because the demand isn't there — it is, endlessly. We close because our commitment is to the people who did order, not to how many orders we can take. Past a certain point, volume becomes the enemy of quality, and quality is the only thing we actually care about.

When I started UrbanFlowers in 2023, I had three assumptions about how this business would work.

I assumed most orders would come in the evening — people thinking about gifts after work, ordering late. Wrong. The majority of our orders come in the morning.

I assumed most of our buyers would be women. Wrong. The overwhelming majority are men, consistently, across every occasion and every season.

I assumed most of our florists would be women. Wrong again — not because we've ever turned anyone away, but because in Thailand, floristry is a predominantly male craft. Until today we haven't had a single permanent female florist on the team. A few female freelancers over the years, but the permanent team has always been men, making flowers, for men to give to women.

All three assumptions, reversed by reality.

The third one surprised me most as a Swede. The first two — once I started paying attention — started to make a strange kind of sense. And it turns out, there's a body of scientific research that explains exactly why.

The Details Men Get Into

The pattern holds year-round, not just at Valentine's. The 100-stem arrangements — mostly men. The 200-stem grand statements — mostly men. The 300-rose installations that turn a room into something cinematic — in our experience, exclusively men. Nono, our Head Florist with over a decade in the industry, says it plainly: anniversary flowers are bought predominantly by men. Birthday surprises, same story. The bigger the arrangement, the more likely there's a man behind it.

If we're being specific about it: among our customers, it tends to be Western expats who go furthest with the grand gesture — the 200 stems, the coordinated gifts, the very deliberate card instructions. Thai customers feel the same things. They just often express it differently — quieter, more private, less performative. Both are men giving flowers. The impulse is identical. The volume knob is just set differently.

And every morning, Alice sits down with the day's gift cards. Some are typed, some handwritten, some dictated over the phone by a man who sounds like he's been rehearsing. She reads every one. I miss you. Happy anniversary, my love. I'm sorry. Thank you for everything. Will you marry me?

I sometimes describe UrbanFlowers as a kind of modern telegraph. The flowers are the medium. The message is always about the relationship. And in the vast majority of cards Alice prepares, it is a man sending it.

The Peacock Problem

So why? Why is it predominantly men, so consistently, across cultures and centuries and Bangkok condos alike?

The answer comes from an unlikely place: game theory.

In 2005, biologists Peter Sozou and Robert Seymour published a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that used mathematical modelling to determine the optimal courtship gift. What they found was counterintuitive. The ideal gift is one that is costly to the giver but has no practical value to the receiver.

Think about that. Jewellery can be sold. Cash can be spent. A weekend away has utility. But flowers? Flowers are dead in a week. You cannot eat them, wear them, or exchange them. They serve no function except being beautiful — and that, precisely, is what makes them the perfect signal.

A man who spends money on something that will be gone by Friday is communicating something that cannot be faked: he has resources, and he is spending them on you. As Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, observed: flowers "do not increase a woman's survival prospects as much as they reduce a man's bank account." That's not a flaw in the logic. That's the entire point.

Biologists call this the Handicap Principle. A peacock's tail is enormous, metabolically expensive, and attracts predators. It is genuinely costly to carry. Which is exactly why it works as a signal — only a genuinely strong peacock can afford the handicap. The wastefulness is the proof.

Flowers work identically. The fact that they die is not the tragedy. It is the message.

Men Give More. The Data Is Not Close.

It isn't just flowers. Men outspend women on romantic gifts by roughly two to one — consistently, across multiple data sources, across years.

National Retail Federation surveys show men spend an average of $235 on Valentine's Day. Women spend around $119. Some studies put the gap wider. Men are more likely to celebrate the holiday at all, and significantly more likely to spend over $100. Around 70% of Valentine's Day bouquets globally are purchased by men.

Research by Gad Saad and Tripat Gill at Concordia University found that men report more tactical motivations for gift-giving than women — demonstrating commitment, creating a strong impression, signalling long-term interest. Women assumed men shared their motivations. They don't. Whether consciously or not, men are making a case for themselves.

One experiment made this vivid. Researchers found that men donated over 57% of their earnings when observed by an attractive woman — significantly more than when observed by another man, or no one. Women's generosity did not shift based on the observer. The male display instinct is not abstract. It responds to who is watching, and it responds immediately.

We see this in Bangkok every day. And the bigger the feeling, the bigger the gesture.

Flowers Is the Gift. The Relationship Is the Investment.

That is how I think about what we do at UrbanFlowers.

The flowers cost money and take thought. But what they communicate — attention, care, the willingness to do something deliberately beautiful for another person — is what accumulates over time. Research from New Mexico State University describes male gift-giving in committed relationships as a mate-retention strategy: an ongoing signal of continued investment. The courtship doesn't end when the relationship begins. It just changes shape.

Flowers are almost perfectly designed for that ongoing signal. They are perishable. You cannot send the same roses forever. Each gesture has to be renewed.

Some of our customers have been ordering from us since we opened. Same occasion, same woman, year after year. A small, repeated act of attention that over enough time means everything.

The Proposal

We could keep going with statistics. But let me tell you about Chris.

Chris was one of our earliest customers, and he arrived with a very specific plan. He wanted a photograph — of himself and his then-girlfriend — printed and placed inside the arrangement. On the back of the photo, he had written his proposal.

There was one problem: we did not own a photo printer.

Chris sent us the photo and trusted us to handle the rest — someone on our team ran to a nearby print shop, a timeline that had no right to work out, and a level of collective anxiety we still talk about. The photo got printed. The arrangement came together. He proposed. She said yes.

Every proposal arranged through UrbanFlowers since has followed the same pattern. A man, a woman, flowers at the centre of the moment. That is not a statistic we planned to track. It is simply what kept happening, year after year.

88% of Men Have Never Received Flowers

Here is a number worth sitting with: 88% of men have never received flowers.

Not rarely. Never.

An Interflora study surfaced this and prompted the now widely-quoted observation that the first time many men receive flowers is at their own funeral. And yet in the same study, nearly half of men said they would love to receive them. A Society of American Florists poll put that figure above 60%.

The Rutgers University research — a landmark series of studies by Dr. Jeannette Haviland-Jones, Director of the Human Emotions Lab — shows why this matters. In controlled experiments, participants who received flowers responded with what psychologists call a Duchenne smile: the genuine, involuntary expression of real delight that involves both the mouth and eyes and cannot be performed on command. The effect was equal for men and women. As Haviland-Jones put it: "Men are not expected to prefer flowers, yet they show the same pattern of smiling and approach as women."

In a separate study focused on male subjects specifically, men who received a surprise bouquet demonstrated increased eye contact, stood closer to the giver, and initiated more conversation. A Japanese study found that male office workers who simply viewed pink roses for four minutes showed measurably reduced anxiety, tension, and fatigue.

The flowers work on men. The biology is identical. The social permission just hasn't caught up — though it is moving. Searches for "flowers for men" grew 95% year-over-year on major platforms.

So, Why Do Men Give Flowers?

Because it is one of the oldest signals a person can send — and one of the most honest.

It says, without a single word: I noticed. I thought of you specifically. I was willing to spend on something deliberately beautiful that will not last — because what I am investing in is not the flowers. It is you.

I see this in Bangkok in ways that still catch me off guard. The man who builds his entire Valentine's plan around a bouquet, down to where the jewellery sits in the box. The regular customer, year after year, same occasion, same woman, never missing. The first-timer who calls three times because he needs to be sure it's right.

And our accountant, sitting in her jacket at 16 degrees, surrounded by 22,000 roses, processing order after order from men who are, in their own way, all saying the same thing.

Then there's Chris, who sent us a photo and trusted us to handle the rest — someone on our team ran to the print shop, hoping it came out right, hoping she'd say yes.

She did.

The flowers helped.