"Oh my gosh! I love your shoes!"

Women buy and wear hot shoes for other women. We should all just accept this, and embrace this, and be happy.

Now, if you still saunter through the shoe section looking for that perfect high heel to impress your man, or the ultimate strappy sandal to score you a hottie at the club, trust me, some day you'll see the light. You'll be sitting at the coffeeshop in some impossibly expensive high heels, and the 4000th woman in a row will tap you on the shoulder and say, "Oh my gosh! I love your shoes!" and you'll sigh and give her a half-assed, "Thanks," while staring longingly at the hot guy a few tables over for whom the expensive high heels were intended, who is not complimenting your shoes (and will never compliment your shoes), when it hits you: Here you are, waiting and yearning for the male attention you dreamed your footwear would bring, brushing off all these perfectly lovely female compliments, but what if those female compliments are good enough? What if they're better than good? Why are 4000 woman compliments not as good as one man's?

Let me tell you, they're much better. Getting a shoe compliment from a woman is like having Bobby Flay come up to you at a party and tell you your seven-layer dip was incredible, like having Whitney Houston (pre-crack, of course) duck her head into your car window at a stoplight and tell you that she overheard you belting out "I Will Always Love You" and that you've really got something there, like having Mario Testino tap you on the shoulder when you're posing for Myspace self-portraits in front of your bathroom mirror and saying "You've got a good eye, kid." We women know our shoes, and our compliments should be appreciated and savored accordingly.

This is not to discount male shoe appreciation entirely. Some men are very knowledgeable about shoes (Manolo and Stuart, I'm looking at you), and this isn't to say the men who aren't don't try. Sure, my boyfriend will throw me a "nice shoes" bone every once in a while, but the truth is that I could put him in front of a shoe lineup that included a pair of ballet flats, some high heels, some nice boots, a pair of sandals, and those giant clunky thigh-high leather and metal leg braces that Forrest Gump had to wear as a child, and I could say "Which footwear seen here do I NOT wear regularly?" and he'd sweat and crack his knuckles and squint and finally break down and scream "Good god! Lay off! I have no idea!" Really, think about it, how many times in your life has a man complimented your shoes (I'll wait while you count on one hand)? How many times in your life has a man asked you "Why the hell do you need so many shoes?!" Yeah, that's what I thought.

Now that we have that clear, here are some impossibly expensive shoes that would earn you a heartfelt "Oh my gosh! I love your shoes!" from me:

Dolce & Gabbana

Miu Miu

Paul & Joe

Fendi (God I love these!)

Pedro Garcia

And some not-so-expensive ones:

Miss Sixty

Jeffrey Campbell

Two Lips

Seychelles

Nine West

(All from Saks, Net-A-Porter, or Nordstrom.com)

Today, tell a woman you love her shoes. Hopefully, she'll have read this blog (let's see...my daily readership divided by over 3 billion women in the world...yes, there's a good chance), and will truly understand what a wonderful compliment it is.