40 Romantic Gestures for Valentine's Day, Sorted by What They Cost You

A romantic gesture is a piece of deliberate effort aimed at one specific person. That is the whole definition, and it leaves out most of what people assume belongs in it. Surprise is optional, money is optional, and so is whether anybody else ever sees it.

What is left is the cost to you, and the dollars are the least interesting part of that.

Every gesture below is paid for in one of four currencies: attention, time, money or nerve. Most people have exactly one of those going spare, and most lists of romantic ideas are priced entirely in the two you do not have.

So the forty here are sorted by what they take out of you rather than by how they look. Read the column you can afford, then read the one you cannot.

February 14 is the day this question gets asked, so there is a section on the day itself further down. Everything else works on an ordinary Wednesday, which is where most of it belongs.

The gesture that lands is the one you could least afford, and money is rarely the thing you are short of.

The four currencies, and why the exchange rate is not what you think

In 2018, Hongbo Yu and three colleagues published a study designed to take gratitude apart. Thirty-one people lay in a scanner while another player decided, round by round, whether to spend their own bonus money to reduce a painful stimulation the participant was about to receive. Two things moved independently: how much pain the participant was spared, and how much of their bonus the other person gave up to spare it.

After each round, participants rated how grateful they felt, and later sent money back to the other player, knowing the other player would never find out. Both numbers rose with both factors, and the two did not carry equal weight. What it had cost the other person counted for more than what the participant had gained, and the authors say so in as many words: the benefactor's cost “may play a more prominent role in the generation of grateful feeling than the benefit one receives.”

That is a laboratory, with strangers, money and electric shocks, and it is not evidence about your marriage. It does put a number on something people already half know, which is that gratitude tracks what a thing took out of the person who did it more closely than it tracks what arrived.

Which makes the exchange rate the whole question. Two hundred dollars from somebody who has it spare costs almost nothing. Ten minutes from somebody with no minutes costs a great deal. One sentence said out loud in front of four friends costs a private person more than either.

Nobody is fluent in all four. Work out which one you have going spare and spend it, then read the column you find hardest, because that is the one that will register.

How often this has to happen

It has to happen often, and it does not have to be impressive.

Sara Algoe, Shelly Gable and Natalya Maisel gave 67 cohabiting couples a paper form to fill in every night for two weeks. Each one went into an envelope sealed with a stamper that recorded the date and time, so nobody could do a week of them on a Sunday. They got 1,768 forms back out of a possible 1,876.

On the days when one partner felt grateful for something the other had done, both of them reported more connection and more satisfaction with the relationship the day after, with the previous day's ratings held constant. The person who did the thing gained as much as the person it was done to.

None of those couples were doing an exercise. Algoe and her co-authors make a point of it. Nobody was counting their blessings, writing gratitude letters, or being, in the paper's phrase, “deliberately and explicitly pampered for a week.” It came out of ordinary evenings in which somebody did something thoughtful and somebody else noticed.

Scale is a red herring here. A large gesture is a more expensive one rather than a better one, and the longer version of that argument is in a separate post about effort. What follows is the bank.

Ten gestures that cost attention

These are free and they are the hardest ones on the page. Money can be earned and an afternoon can be found. Attention has to be spent at the moment the thing is said, which is almost always a moment neither of you was treating as important.

They all fail the same test. If you could have done it without having listened, it belongs in a different column.

• Buy the thing they mentioned once and have forgotten mentioning. The hot sauce, the pen they liked at the airport store, the paperback they photographed and put back. Six weeks later lands harder than the same afternoon.
• Learn the order and place it. The coffee, the takeout order, the drink at the bar, including the modifications, then order it in front of them without checking.
• Move a recurring irritation permanently onto your side of the ledger. Trash night, the insurance that renews in March, the form the school keeps sending. Take it and keep it, so it stops being something they check up on.
• Repair the small broken thing they have mentioned more than twice. The drawer that sticks, the faucet, the app that keeps logging them out.
• Put the date that is not an anniversary in your calendar. The morning of the interview, the day the results come back, the anniversary of a death in their family. Set it a year ahead and send one message when it arrives.
• Ask about the person they mentioned last week, by name, without needing to be told again who that is.
• When they come in with good news, put your phone face down and ask three questions about it before you say a word about your own day.
• Notice the change before you are told about it. The haircut, the rearranged shelf, the new thing at the top of the playlist.
• Bring back food from the specific place they said they missed, not the near equivalent on the way home.
• Name one thing they did that nobody else would have registered, in a full sentence with the detail left in. “You rerouted the whole weekend so my mother could come, and I never had to ask” does more work than a paragraph of praise.

The last one has a right way to do it

Sara Algoe, Laura Kurtz and Nicole Hilaire filmed couples thanking each other. Seventy-three couples in the first study, 257 in the second. Each pair sat down and one of them said thank you out loud, about something the other had actually done that week.

Coders scored every thank-you on two things, how much it praised the other person and how much it described what the speaker got out of it.

Only one of those moved anything. When the thank-you was about the partner (“You go out of your way,” “that shows how responsible you are”), the person being thanked came away feeling more understood, better in themselves, and more loving toward the person thanking them. When it was about the benefit to the speaker (“It let me relax,” “It makes me happy”), none of the outcomes moved.

So point the sentence at them. “Thanks, that saved me an hour” is a receipt. “You always spot that before I do” is a gesture, and it takes the same four seconds to say.

Ten gestures that cost time

Time is the currency everybody claims to have none of and spends enormous amounts of anyway, mostly on things that are not their relationship. An hour is worth more than a hundred dollars to most people reading this.

Two conditions, or you have paid for nothing. The hours have to be visible somewhere in the result, and they have to be hours you would have wanted back.

• Cook the dish from their childhood, and get the recipe from the parent or sibling who still makes it, not from the internet. The phone call is most of the gift.
• Build the playlist in order. Ten or twelve songs, chronological, one for each year or each chapter. Send it with nothing written underneath.
• Write a page by hand about one specific evening. What you noticed, what you were thinking at the time and did not say. Leave it somewhere they will find it when you are not in the room.
• Take a whole weekday off together and put nothing in it. No errands, no admin, no lunch booking to be back for.
• Learn the thing they keep trying to teach you, on your own, and turn up already knowing the rules.
• Print the photographs. Forty prints costs less than a bouquet, and the evening spent choosing them out of four thousand is the part that counts.
• Plan an entire day end to end, including where you park and what happens if it rains, and hand them nothing to decide.
• Reconstruct the first date as accurately as you can manage, including the parts that went badly.
• Clear out the corner of the house that quietly bothers them. The closet, the garage shelf, the drawer where the chargers live.
• Drive them at the inconvenient hour. The 5am airport run, the pickup at midnight, the two-hour round trip to their sister's.

Ten gestures that cost money

Money is the easiest currency to spend and the one most people reach for first, which is exactly why it buys the least per unit. The research on gift price and appreciation is in a separate post about birthdays. Givers expect the price to register, and recipients do not report it registering.

Money still buys two things nothing else buys. It removes a problem, and it authorizes something they would never authorize for themselves. Anything that does neither is a guess.

• Pay for the thing they keep postponing. The dental work, the physical therapy, the tires, the eye exam they have rebooked twice.
• Upgrade the object they touch every single day. The pillow, the desk chair, the headphones, the kitchen knife. Dull things, used a thousand times a year.
• Buy them back an hour. The grocery delivery instead of the store run, the taxi instead of two buses, a cleaner for a month.
• Book the class they mentioned and pay for both places, so it stops being an idea and becomes a Thursday.
• Replace the worn-out thing they refuse to replace, in the same color, with no speech about how bad the old one had gotten.
• Pay for the trip to see the person they miss, and book it on a weekend you have already checked is clear.
• Frame one photograph properly. A real print in a real frame, on a wall at eye level.
• Send flowers in a month with nothing in it, to wherever they would most like to be seen receiving them.
• Put money against the thing they are saving for, and say nothing else about it.
• Buy the ticket for the team, the band or the show they follow and never go to, and take the day off around it.

The way a money gesture goes wrong

It becomes the annual event, and an annual event carries no information.

If every February involves the same set menu and a card off the same shelf, the money has stopped saying anything about you. It is the entry fee. Spend it on a Tuesday in March instead, when nobody is expecting it and the same amount buys a real surprise.

Ten gestures that cost nerve

This is the column that produces the stories people are still telling ten years later. Nerve is the willingness to be visibly, unironically sincere while somebody watches. It costs nothing, and for a great many people it is the most expensive thing on this page.

One rule here, different from the others. A nerve gesture only counts if it costs you nerve. If you are the person who makes the speech at every party, the speech is a time gesture at best.

• Say the specific thing out loud in front of their friends, with no joke on the end of it.
• Tell them what you were thinking on a particular day years ago and never said.
• Apologize properly for the old thing you both stopped mentioning, without the context and without explaining yourself.
• Ask them out. By message, in the afternoon, naming the place and the time, exactly as if you were not already living together.
• Dance in the kitchen with the blinds open.
• Learn the song and play it badly, to an audience of one.
• Tell their parent, or their oldest friend, something true and specific about them, and let it find its way back.
• Say it first, during a stretch where neither of you has been saying it.
• Read the letter to them out loud instead of handing it over and leaving the room.
• Introduce them to a stranger the way you would describe them to somebody whose opinion you cared about, while they stand there.

What February 14 does to all of this

Valentine's Day has one property no other romantic occasion has. Both of you know it is coming, and so does everybody else in the country.

That takes away two tools at once. Surprise goes, because the date is public. Scarcity goes, because every restaurant, florist and movie theater is at capacity across the same eleven hours.

What survives is the attention column, which the calendar cannot help anybody else copy.

Four practical consequences, in the order they bite:

• The restaurant is worse on the fourteenth than on any other night of its year. Two seatings, a fixed menu at a marked-up price, a kitchen at full stretch, and a table you have to be out of by 8:30. Book the thirteenth or the fifteenth and you get the same room at its best.
• If you want the day itself, take the meal nobody else wants. Breakfast is available, lunch is quiet, and a weekday morning off work together is rarer than a dinner.
• The default is a gesture whose price has been set for you by other people. A card, roses at four times the January rate and a table is fine, and it says what everybody else said that day.
• A gesture on the fifteenth costs more attention than the same gesture on the fourteenth, because nothing reminded you to make it. Some couples move the whole thing by a week for that reason.

If they have said they do not want anything

Take it as a constraint rather than as an instruction to do nothing. It rules out money and rules out nothing else, which leaves three columns and about thirty options.

Ask one clarifying question first, if you can do it without spoiling anything. No fuss, or no spending? Those point at different columns. The long version of this is in the birthday post, where the same sentence does the most damage.

If you have until tonight

Sorted by how much of the day is left.

• Ten minutes. Send one message containing a specific memory and no request. Or do the chore they were dreading before they get to it, and say nothing when they notice.
• An hour. The handwritten page, the playlist in order, or the meal they associate with being looked after, which is rarely the expensive one.
• The evening itself. Phones in a drawer for the whole evening, one item from the nerve column, and nothing on a screen after nine.

Where we come into this

Big Moments plans dates for couples. Tell us who the two of you are, and a whole evening comes back. Where to go, in what order, the personal details built in, and a fallback for the night the place is closed.

There is also a deck in the app for the exact problem this post describes. It is called Something Nice. You pull a card when you want to do something for them and your head has gone blank, and the cards are sorted by effort, from two minutes to a free Saturday. It is a Premium feature, alongside the Bucket List, Future Us, Rose Bud Thorn, the Newlywed Game and the Story of Us.

The free look keeps Date Madlibs, 1,000 Questions, Act It Out, the daily question, the shared calendar and the notepad. If you would rather have one occasion handled than a membership, the Anniversary Plan and the Birthday Plan are sold on their own. A first month of Premium currently costs nothing and asks for no card.

Claim your free month of Big Moments PremiumAn email address, and nothing else.

If you want to do one this week

Work out your column before you pick the gesture. Whichever currency you have most of is the one you will get done. Whichever you have least of is the one that will land.

Pick something from the expensive column and put a date on it in your calendar this evening. A gesture with no date on it does not happen.

Then do something from the cheap column tomorrow, and do not mention that it came off a list.

Research referenced

• Yu, H., Gao, X., Zhou, Y., and Zhou, X., “Decomposing Gratitude: Representation and Integration of Cognitive Antecedents of Gratitude in the Brain,” The Journal of Neuroscience, 2018. Gratitude rose with both the benefit received and the cost to the giver, and weighted the cost more heavily. Strangers in a scanner, not couples.
• Algoe, S. B., Gable, S. L., and Maisel, N. C., “It's the little things: Everyday gratitude as a booster shot for romantic relationships,” Personal Relationships, 2010. Sixty-seven cohabiting couples, fourteen nightly diaries each.
• Algoe, S. B., Kurtz, L. E., and Hilaire, N. M., “Putting the You in Thank You: Examining Other-Praising Behavior as the Active Relational Ingredient in Expressed Gratitude,” Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2016.