The 14th of February is Valentines Day – a day that was utilized/made by industries to rise their sales. I would like to show you THOUGHTFUL valentine gifts to choose meaning over money. Love is nothing you can balance out with expensive gifts. Here are 5 thoughtful valentine gifts for your love:
1. Write a letter
It might sound old-fashioned or boring, but it can be a very intimate and emotional way to explain your feelings for your partner, especially when it‘s difficult for you to express your feelings. Writing letters is something that my boyfriend and I usually do for Christmas and birthdays. These questions might help you to write a letter:
- What has happened this year in your relationship? What obstacles have you overcome together? Happened something very special in this year, like an engagement?
- What would you like to work on together? This question is tricky, since we tend to blame each other. To avoid blaming talk about "we" instead of "you" and always start with how it makes you feel. For example DON‘T write: "You are always jealous, I would like to change it for this year." DO write: "Last year I often felt not trustworthy and that made me really sad. We wish for a strong bond and unbreakable trust in our relationship. So for this year we should concentrate on talking openly about what we both can do better to achieve the trust we wish from each other. It would make me happy to work together on this part of our relationship." If you think this question is too sensible for this phase of your relationship, just leave it out.
- Which achievements of your partner are you proud of? Don‘t forget about the "small" things, when you are talking about achievements: attending therapy, dealing with difficult situations, personal development, learned a new skill…
- What do you love the most about your partner? Think about his/her characteristics first and explain the WHY! For example: "I love how calm you are in every situation, especially when I can‘t keep cool. You are my rock."
- Where do you see your relationship in five years?
- End the letter with, "Thank you for…"
Tip: It gives more value when you write the letter by hand, because today we rarely write letters anymore.
2. Create/order a photo album
Photos are the most important thing, but often we recognize their value when it‘s already too late. Moments and loved people will disappear, this is not a question of "if", this is a question of "when".
Don‘t waste time on creating or ordering a photo album! You don‘t want your phone or laptop to lose all the photos you have of your relationship. Also it‘s more beautiful to pass an album on to your children and grandchildren rather than a USB-Stick.
A photo album appears in different forms and shapes! You can put a lot of work in it by buying an empty album, printing each photo and stick it one by one in the album.
Tip: You can even write notes and stick tickets, love-notes you left on the kitchen tables, letters you wrote to each other or the flight tickets of your last vacation into it.
If you are looking for a more time efficient option you can order a photo album. Especially when you already have professional couple photos don‘t hesitate to contact me! I handpicked a print company that does a stunning work on prints and albums. It‘s high-quality work and I really tried a few (disappointing) companies before. So this is the most time efficient option with the most beautiful outcome to order a photo album from this print company.
3. Bake a small cake
This gift idea was my first valentines gift for my boyfriend. It was a small heart-shaped chocolate cake, I baked for him. We always agreed on gifting each other with value and time instead of money.
To bring your cake into a heart-shaped form you, you have two options:
- First option: You have/buy a heart-shaped baking form, where you fill in the dough. After you baked it, it‘s already shaped like a heart.
- Second option: You make a flat cake on the baking tray and cut out the hearth-shaped form with a bigger cookie cutter. You can stack it up with jam in between or just have many smaller, flat, hear-shaped cakes.
Tip: In case you are not a very talented baker, try to bake a vegan cake. For vegan bakery you don‘t have to beat an egg white, you just mix everything together in one bowl.
4. 365 love notes in a jar
365 love notes are a lot of work, but SO worth it. For a year your partner can pull a note out of a jar each day. To give it more variation you can use different paper colors and give each color a topic. For example:
- Red = things I love about you
- Yellow = shared memories
- Green = a photo of us
- Blue = a poem
- Pink = words of encouragement
- Purple = Mini-Date
Your jar can simply be an empty jam jar.
5. Prepare a hotel-breakfast
In our family it‘s tradition to prepare a hotel-breakfast for birthdays, Mother‘s Day and Father‘s Day. A hotel-breakfast is in our case a bigger breakfast where you can choose from different breakfast-options and often things we normally don‘t have at home. I once did this for my boyfriend and even designed a breakfast menu, where he could decide between different morning-coffees, egg dishes and sweet options.
You can prepare it bigger or smaller! Here are some breakfast option that we have at our traditional family hotel-breakfast:
- all kinds of bread, rolls and pastery
- cheese options
- ham and eggs, scrambled eggs, soft-boiled eggs
- lot of vegetables (especially in summer from the garden)
- self-made guacamole
- orange juice, apple juice, tea, coffee
- cake
- yoghurt
- muesli
- newspaper for by dad
and so on…
Hopefully these five thoughtful valentine gifts, where you choose meaning over money, will bring joy to you and your partner! Don‘t forget that value is often the time we spend on doing something for our partners or the time we spend on being with them – not how much money we spend for them.
Have a great Valentines Day!
Share this story
