The Dreaded First Birthday Gift in a New Relationship.

When my boyfriend and I first started dating we soon realized our birthdays are only a day apart. In some ways this was a relief — after all, having to buy the first gift in a relationship is a tough call… with questions arising such as:

How much is too much? Does the cost of gift depend on the number of dates you’ve been on? Is this going to create a precedent on how much needs to be spent in the future? Will it seem too intense if I buy something romantic? Will I be pushing us down the friend road if my gift is too silly? What do guys/girls even like??

But when you both have to buy a gift it creates its own problems:

Is my gift going to be as good as his? Is he going down the romantic route or the gag-gift route? Do I buy a card? Is he even getting me a gift??

After a lot of thought, I had a genius solution. Make something! Sure, sure, nobody’s excited by a homemade gift from your Aunt Bertha who has recently discovered knitting, but this doesn’t apply when you’re in the honeymoon phase of a relationship.  It’s really only in the later years of your relationship that you start complaining to your friends that you got a pair of socks again for Christmas and attribute it to the fact that your relationship is becoming complacent. On the other hand, when you first fall in love, anything you get from your new honey is going to make you swoon (i.e. I bought you these socks because your feet are always cold and they match the blue of your eyes) especially if a lot of thought went into it.

So I started to think about what Mark likes… art, T-shirts, gadgets, comedy… and settled on a combination of all three. A T-shirt born from a silly conversation we had one day about a wristwatch that could do everything (please note, this would now be called an iPhone).

I got to work drawing the diagram in Illustrator using my trusty tablet and managed to finish the next evening. Then I saved my file in every format I could think of (no room for error!) onto my USB flash drive and walked down to Come Customized. I was very happy to hear that my T-shirt would be ready in a few days, because I had really left this whole gifting business to the last minute. Unfortunately being a novice, I didn’t realize that such a complicated design (because of all the tiny lines) meant vinyl screening was out. And as expected, unless I wanted at least 25 T-shirts made ,and had tons of money to spend, screen printing wasn’t an option either. So Heat Transfer it was!

Upon giving the wrapped gift I started to have second thoughts about the whole idea.

Maybe he’ll think it stupid. He’s such a good artist, he’s going to think this is garbage. Who gives a home-made T-shirt to an adult? Is it even funny??

But it was too late… he was in the midst of unwrapping.

His reaction? Complete shock (which of course, I took to mean that he hated it). But au contraire, after a second he said it was the nicest and most thoughtful gift he had ever received. (Score!)

So in short, how do you make your boyfriend happy on his birthday and not break the bank?

Make him a T-shirt that’s based entirely on a silly conversation you had on your second date. Or you could just hire me to do it