If you’re looking for a relationship boost, you should be considering romantic gestures. Romantic gestures are a way to pump your relationship with a nice hefty shot of adrenaline. It’s what everybody secretly hopes for in a relationship.
We all want the storybook romance, whether we’re male or female, something to sweep us off our feet. Might be different for a man and a woman, obviously, but you want something that says, wow, I am loved. And I’m going to go over 10 consistently reliable romantic gestures.
Not all will work for you, but you should hear at least a handful that you can kind of have at your disposal in your back pocket to use at any time when your relationship needs a little bit of an uplift.
10 Romantic Gestures you can use to boost your relationship
Surprise Date Night
So the first romantic gesture that you should be considering is a surprise date night. Now, usually date nights are better if they are consistent.
So every Saturday night, me and my wife go on a date or me and my husband go on a date on Wednesdays or take a hike on Sundays. And that’s great. That provides a stability of knowing that you’re loved.
But if you want to really make a romantic gesture, all of these should have some element of surprise in them. And so a surprise date night is where you just plan everything and they don’t see it coming. Now, you have to be a little careful because sometimes people don’t really love that kind of surprises.
So you have to let them know that something’s being planned, but you have to keep some things tucked up your sleeve. So you might have a wife that doesn’t do well with surprises because she’s anxious that the kids aren’t taken care of, or a husband who’s worried about work getting done, whatever it is. Not to play too much into stereotypes, but they kind of exist for a reason.
So you might want to tell them, hey, I have some stuff planned for tonight. It’s a surprise. If you’re talking to your wife, just make sure you have comfortable shoes or you might want to wear something fancy.
That’s all you really need to do. And they might say, well, where are the kids? Or what about work? And you say, I’ll take care of it. And then plan the date night so that it’s around things they like.
So if they love sushi and you love Italian, take them to sushi. If they love racing sports cars and you’re more of a ballet person, take them to race cars. It’s about giving them the ideal experience and your joy should be wrapped up in seeing how well you do in making them happy.
Love Notes
Love notes and any kind of words of affirmation are great and they naturally work better with surprise pretty much every time. But a handwritten note is really what we all kind of crave the most.
It’s why birthday cards and little love letters that we have or we give to each other, most people save those. Most people, even if they just tuck them in their nightstand drawer, most people do save those because there’s something about the handwriting. There’s something about the card they chose.
You could take it up another notch too. You can get a custom wax seal with your initials on it, both you and your partners. You can spritz a little perfume on the love letter, but take some time and point out things that are unique about your relationship that you really want to highlight.
Now, a little quick pro tip, you can put this into chat GPT if you need some ideas. So give chat GPT a little bit of a rundown of things you want to mention and say, I want to write a love letter for my wife or my husband, please highlight these. And it’ll usually brainstorm a good first draft, not a final draft, but a good first draft.
And then you have to make it actually sound like you, otherwise it sounds like you hired someone or you had a robot write it for you.
Tech-Free Night
If you are like every other couple in existence, pretty much at this point, you guys have been sucked into your phones, watching YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or whatever.
So make a plan to have a tech free night on that tech free night, play games together, go on walks, go to a museum, do some art together, have a hot tub, but just make it completely free of technology. No TVs, no phones, no computers.
Recreate a Special Memory
So take your wife or your husband to where they proposed to you. Go to your first date spot. If there was a funny accident where, you know, someone bent over and split their pants, take them back there and take funny photos then and now.
Makes for a great romantic gesture because you’re kind of recreating that nostalgia or you’re nostalgically recreating a moment that you shared together. And a shared history is part of what makes relationships so amazing. It’s why couples talk about their kids constantly, not just because they love their kids, but because it’s something they both share.
Gift Giving
Everybody loves gifts, even if it makes them uncomfortable, even if they feel like, ah, it’s a waste of money. Everybody loves the perfect gift.
So really spend time thinking about what is something your partner loves. If they collect watches, if they love flowers, what kind of flower? Don’t just go out and buy a dozen roses, unless that happens to be your partner’s favorite kind of rose. You should say, well, you know what, I know that she loves purple and I’m going to get purple tulips with a purple ribbon and then I’m going to put it in the perfect kind of white ceramic vase she likes.
You have to do it on a level that’s a little bit higher. That really shows you put thought into it. What is someone doing? I’ve had couples where their partner just graduated college or their master’s program or their doctorate and what they do is they get their degree and they frame it very specially with like a wood laminate.
It’s a really thoughtful gift. Go dig a little deeper. Try to figure out something that’s important to them and then make a physical gift out of it.
Acts of Service
Again, taken up a notch. So if you are the person that does the dishes, do the whole kitchen.
If you do the laundry, maybe fold it and wrap it up in a little bow. Do things a little bit more than usual. Again, these are big sweeping romantic gestures.
These aren’t going to be done every day. Do them with some passion and take it up a notch.
Weekend Getaway
It’s one of the best things you can do. If you can get away somewhere that’s only an hour or two in terms of travel, whether you’re taking a train, a plane, or just driving. You don’t want to burn a whole weekend getaway on a long trip because then you won’t have much time to get there.
Even on a three or four day weekend, anything that takes eight hours or seven hours of travel kind of kills a lot of time. But if you’re, I live in Los Angeles, so a weekend getaway to Las Vegas is already pushing it a little, in my opinion. But Santa Barbara would be good.
It’s an hour away. Or San Diego, somewhere where you can just drive for a little bit, enjoy a quiet weekend together, some good food, and really kind of unplug and spend time together. That’s really what it is.
You’re taking yourselves out of your normal setting. Now, if you work from home or you’re sucked into the laptop, leave it at home. Really just tell everybody, hey, I’m going to unplug for two days for the sake of my relationship and mental health.
Everybody kind of gets it. Unless you’re a doctor, a policeman, a fireman, or someone on call for life and death emergencies, I hate to break it to you. The world will survive without you for a couple of days.
Cooking Together
Beautiful experience, right? Again, I would recommend not using the computer, the phone. It’s too easy to get sucked into it.
Print the recipe out. Get all of the ingredients. You can go shopping together, but you can also have everything ready and say, we’re going to cut, we’re going to cook.
It’s this salmon you always wanted to try. It’s the perfect cut of steak. I got a perfect cut of beef.
We’re going to make the vegan dish that you’ve always wanted to really perfect. And I’ve gotten the best truffle oil or whatever it is. Again, sharing in that experience and eating together, there’s a lot of chemistry there.
There’s also a lot of fun by play. You guys can snap each other with towels, run around the kitchen. It really does make for a really sweet thing.
And then what I would suggest is keep the windows open. You don’t want the house smelling like garlic, right? Have some oil diffusers or candles to make it smell nice after dinner so that you can enjoy the atmosphere as well.
Public Declarations
Now it used to be you would make big sweeping announcements in the town square saying, I love you. And you’d have, you know, flowers and chocolate. I’m in love with my wife.
You could still do that. It does embarrass a lot of people, but the modern equivalent of that (and one I discuss frequently in marriage counseling with my clients) is writing amazing photo montage posts for Facebook, you know, Twitter, LinkedIn, all these kinds of, you know, not so much LinkedIn, but Instagram talking about how much you love your partner and tagging them in it, making sure they see it. Maybe I’ve had one client even did it every day for a week and it wasn’t their anniversary.
It was just, Hey, want to take a minute to actually talk about how much I’m in love with the person and how lucky I am feeling very grateful. And every day was a different picture, a different story, a different year of their marriage. She did it on their seventh year anniversary and every day or a couple of months after the anniversary, technically, but every day was one year of their relationship with a different photo in memory.
It’s a beautiful idea. And it was very public. And you know, that guy’s got a lot of emails and phone calls from people saying, man, you’re pretty lucky.
Right. And that’s what you want. You want that kind of, you know, the public declaration that the, the natural reactions you want other people calling and saying, you guys are so cute.
You guys are so lucky. That’s the effect that you’re looking for.
Committing to Regular Check-ins
There is something very romantic about committing to something together, right? Just like on New Year’s, when you say, I’m going to lose weight, I’m going to get in shape and you make a commitment, it feels significant. If you do that on an emotional level in your relationship, Hey, why don’t we, why don’t we have a meeting every Sunday night where we check in and say, you know, ask these 10 questions of each other. I printed it out.
I laminated it. You could put it in your nightstand. I think, you know, let’s set alarms in our phone and let’s make this part of our relationship because we deserve to treat each other with enough respect that we can actually make the relationship a priority for 20 minutes once a week.
Those are the 10. Enjoy them, use them in good health, and I’ll see you next time.