by Kenneth Andrews

Created on: July 08, 2010   Last Updated: October 16, 2010

Ladies often complain that it is hard to buy presents for men, and this problem seems to be particularly acute when they have to buy a birthday present for a boyfriend. "He's just so hard to buy for!" they wail, which is odd, because put a man in a department store and within ten minutes he will have a basket full of cheap kung-fu DVDs and a new mini-fridge for beer.

The real problem is that girlfriends have trouble trying to think of a birthday present for a boyfriend which will show them to be loving, attentive, practical and thoughtful, to demonstrate that they know their man better than anyone else, even his mother. Especially his mother. But that's because that's the sort of present a girlfriend wants. Men have different priorities. They want something... that they want. Below are some ideas.

Games

If your boyfriend likes video games (and if he doesn't then he just hasn't played enough of them), buy him a video game, or maybe a whole console if you live together. You may quail at the thought of buying a "boy's" game - what if you get it wrong? Well, there's a fool-proof method. Walk into your nearest retailer that stocks video games and say the following:

"Hail, shopkeeper! I would like to purchase that brand new game that's just come out - the one where you're a soldier, and you have to shoot at other soldiers, and the graphics are revolutionary and the attention to historic detail is painstaking."

They will give you a game, because there is always a game like this which has been released in the last month or so. They say hindsight is a wonderful thing, but any 21st Century man thrown back in time to the 1940s is now so up to speed with the Second World War that thanks to video games he'd be leading the troops in the assault on Hitler's Berlin bunker two years before Hitler had even got around to hiding in it.

Not only do a lot of guys enjoy playing video games, but they rarely purchase them without a frisson of guilt that it's a fairly frivolous thing on which to spend your disposable income. Getting a guilt-free video game as a present is always a hell of a rush.

Hardware

As with WW2 video games, there is an unwritten law of modern consumer electronics: there is always a bigger TV. No matter how up to date your boyfriend's home entertainment kit, you can always buy him an upgrade for his birthday, whether that's a whole new system or just a new iPod dock will depend on how long you have been together and how much money you want to spend.

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