I know not whether the practice continues today, but in times past young ladies would sometimes dream of love and express their hopes by slowly picking the petals of a flower and alternately saying,  “He loves me.”  “He loves me not.”

Back in the age of dinosaurs when I was a teen, I remember young girls sometimes playing a version of this with straws.  They would work their way up from the bottom of the straw, crushing it between their fingers and saying “He loves me. He don’t.”  The positive and the negative alternated with each squeeze of the straw, and the final answer was determined by the final squeeze at straw’s end.

As a young teen my future wife Ann played a slightly different version of the game.  Hers went,  “He loves me. He don’t.  He’ll marry me. He won’t. He would if he could. He could if he would.  But he won’t.”  That version gave Ann slightly less chance of a positive outcome, but it was of no consequence.  I loved her and married her anyway.