Flowers Are Not the Bare Minimum

there’s a phrase i keep running into online. bare minimum.

someone brings flowers, bare minimum. plans the date, bare minimum. pays, remembers the small preferences, shows up on time. bare minimum, all of it.

jhumkas, a teddy, perfume, kashmiri chudiyan. still filed under the least a person could do.

i understand where the phrase came from. a lot of people spent years being told to expect nothing, to be grateful for crumbs. raising the bar was a way of taking something back. that part deserves respect.

but somewhere along the way the bar stopped being a bar and became a wall.

a bar is something a person can clear. a wall is something nobody can.

and the feeds don’t help. all day they whisper that you’re settling, that if someone isn’t doing the most, they’re doing nothing.

some of that is true. some people really do settle for crumbs, and the reminder matters.

but a lot of it quietly teaches you to overlook the person actually showing up for you.

here’s what i’ve noticed in myself. when someone does something small for me, it doesn’t feel like the least they could do. it feels like something. if a friend brought me flowers every week, i think i’d still light up on week forty.

that’s not low standards. that’s just refusing to lose the part where it feels like something.

when someone pays for dinner, i say thank you. not because i owe them anything. because it was kind and i noticed. calling kindness an obligation drains the warmth out of both people.

and there’s a plainer mechanism under the warm feeling. appreciation is positive reinforcement. people do more of what gets noticed. that goes for the person across the table, and it goes for you too.

which is the whole argument, really. you can hold high standards and still be soft about the small things. the two were never enemies.

so if someone did something small for you this week, tell them. out loud, in actual words.

worst case, you made someone’s evening. best case, you get flowers next week too.