by Tony Catalano

Created on: September 30, 2009

I could start this off with some sappy cliche about love and romance and how great it is, but for God's sake I think we have all had enough of that. Let's get to some solid gift ideas that aren't teddy bears, candles, and flowers. I like to think the members of my audience are all aware that those things are considered 'romantic'.

A cute gesture might be a 'mix-tape'. Don't just put music they like on it though, I think they are well-aware of what music they like. Put songs that have a significance to you, them, or the both of you, and intersperse it with things that you know they like, and you think they would like. There's nothing in life like new music. Even if they don't like every song on it, if you have a unifying theme or message it makes it significantly easier to not care about the one tune that kinda sucks.

It might be a little excessive depending on the progress of your relationship but consider a custom photo album. A lot of couples just love plastering their rooms with pictures of their significant others, on their walls, in picture frames, here, there, everywhere. It'll make things considerably more straight-forward if they just have a photo album of all your wondrous moments together. Try http://www.smilebooks.com/. It's got a lot of options and the cost is likely cheaper than many other things you'd consider getting for your girl/boyfriend. You get those spiffy glossy pages too.

Use your craft. If you're good at something remotely applicable to gift-making than do it. If you play a little bit of guitar learn one of their favorite songs and even if you can't sing that well, try to do so in a cutely bad manner (don't worry I think we all can). If you're an artist, or enjoy drawing you can draw a portrait, or some picture involving them or something that has significance to them. If you're a writer, and even if you aren't, you can write something for them (a letter, story, anything) that displays thoughtfulness and caring in the choice of content. This is especially good if you aren't known to be the romantic or emotional kind. It's usually much easier to put your feelings into written words than spoken.

These are just a small handful of ideas to get you on the track of actually thinking about THEM, and not recycling a bunch of boring ideas that have been done several times over already.

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