Romantic Gestures Can Be Amazing, But They Can Also Ruin Your Relationship

It’s 4pm on a Tuesday and I’m hastily scattering rose petals down the hallway of the apartment I share with my boyfriend. He’ll be home in 10 minutes and I’m panic shaping the petals into a big heart in the living room. ‘Eugh, not good enough’, I think, running around the house attempting to find a pen and paper.

I tear the paper into 15 pieces and write down all things I love about him on each, throwing them in the middle of the heart I’ve shaped. I don’t mean one word of what I’m writing. Or at least, I don’t in that moment.

A few minutes later, he gets home. I’m sat in the bedroom, listening to him walk down the hall and stop at the heart. I hear a sigh. ‘This isn’t going to solve anything’, he says, and now I sigh. I know he’s right, but this is what our relationship had come to.

This was two and a half years into dating and about 85 romantic gestures later. For us, romance had gone from amazing, endearing acts to show how much we cared to a meaningless necessity after every argument – or, an obligation for every anniversary trying to top the last. We had set a precedent for big romantic moments early on, and now we were paying the price.

Seeing Travis Scott’s birthday surprise for Kylie Jenner this morning, I was brought back to that very moment - when I was carelessly scattering petals around my house in the hopes it would end the meaningless argument we’d had hours earlier. Because, just like Travis covering her entire floor in rose petals, we had once started out so well with romantic gestures. At one point in our relationship, they actually meant something.

We began with cute, thoughtful gifts on birthdays, rooms filled with candles and rose-petals on anniversaries, surprise flowers week on week. One year in, if there was a romantic gesture that appeared in a Google search, we had done it. The personalised CD, the picture collage on a canvas, sweet jars filled with reasons he loved me. By year two, we were onto to surprise weekends away and expensive jewellery.

Our romantic gestures went both ways, and frankly, after a while, they were exhausting. Because as you graduate from gesture to gesture, always trying to top yourself, the thing you once did to show you care becomes a stressful, never quite good enough task that ultimately, you feel obliged to do.

If his birthday present last year was accompanied by a 10-minute video of all our best moments together, would a simple pair of trainers do the job this year? Probably, to be honest, but try telling either of us that at the time.

The fact that our gestures had gone from positive celebrations to a requirement for apologies is proof alone of how far we’d dug ourselves into a pit of romance ruin. When giving or receiving flowers every week becomes normal, what is an apology without a gesture of love to go with it? Essentially, in our effort to prove just how much we loved one another, we had set a precedent we would never be able to sustain. Now, Travis Scott probably can sustain it. After all, we were young and poor students so we didn’t exactly have the resources he does.

But still, when you start on your 1st or 2nd anniversary with gestures as big as his, what are you meant to do for your 5th, 10th or 15th? Will he have to cover the whole house in petals next? Hang petals from the windows and build a petal statue of her body?

It’s like celebrating your child’s first birthday with a trip to Disneyland, how do you top that the year after? And what do you by the time they turn 10? Romantic gestures can be amazing, of course. But there’s a fine line between showing someone how much you love them and using gestures to fix problems or perform love for your partner. I certainly learnt that lesson cleaning up those bastard petals and throwing away the notes my then-boyfriend (are you surprised we didn’t last?) didn’t even read. Hopefully, with their infinite resources and endless bank accounts, Kylie and Travis won’t have to

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