12 Romantic things to do for your sweetie online

For when sending an e-card starts getting old.

Need some ideas to romance your baby? There are lots of fun things online that you can make (lolcats, signs, ransom notes, hearts, comic strips, photos, puzzles) or learn about (romantic powerpoints, occasions, email, nicknames). We list the best of them here. If we've missed something please let us know.

Make a comic strip

You could put together a comic strip that speaks to your relationship at Witty Comics. It'll have to be a fairly crude approximation, given the rather generic clip-art available, but hey, that just makes it funnier.

You could also find a classic romantic comic online and edit it a little bit for your honey. If you don't want to edit, you could look through the archive of comics like questionable content or diesel sweeties for something that resonates.

Customize a lolcat

If your beloved is a cat person, there might be something you can do with lolcats. These are, in short, pictures of cats with captions. But that summary disguises their brilliance. If your sweetie already knows about them, great, if not, maybe casually introduce them. Then, once they've come down from their cuteness overload, you'll be all set to hit them with your own, specially prepared, specially titled picture. All you need is a picture of a cat. If you don't have one, you can grab one at stock.xchng. Or, if inspiration isn't striking, just use an existing captioned lolcat from the love category on icanhascheezburger (geek Valentine's day gold). Our favorites:

• we haz an us
• i like big mutts / and i can not lie
• i luvz u / but dis can nevr be

There's also a lolcat-builder you can use. Or you can just send an email written in lolcat-ese. Excuse me, I meant OR U CAN JUS SEND A NEMAIL WRITED N LOLCAT-EES.

Show some signs of love

Don't be shy. Shout your feelings to the world. Or at least make it seem that way with some online sign generators. You can make electronic freeway signs, theater signs, stadium scoreboard signs, license plates, billboards, and lots of others. Prepare a couple, then send them to your beloved to express your feelings in BIG LETTERS.

And for post-modern beloveds who wouldn't touch anything so obviously saccharine-sweet with a 10-foot pole, maybe Stephen Colbert's on-notice board is a more appropriate place to broadcast your feelings. You can still be cute, but at least it feels a bit more counter-cultural.

Send a ransom note

One way to get the attention of your beloved is to send them a ransom note. If you haven't much experience with kidnapping, there are plenty of online tools to help you out, such as the Contact Sheet ransom note generator. Just don't do something silly and actually kidnap something your sweetie actually cares about, such as a teddy bear or a bucket. That's not going to help. Limit yourself to intangibles, such as:

• The internet
• Their lolcats
• Their intangibles

Make a message from virtual Candy Hearts

The ACME heartmaker lets you make your own customized candy hearts, engraving the name of your beloved on the colored confectionary of your choice. You can be as sappy or as snarky as you like. For a different style of heart (including “goth mode”), check out cryptogram hearts.

If you don't have anywhere handy to store the resulting pictures for your loved-one's viewing, you could also try our own Wuv Net, which lets you create a heart-filled page for others to look at. You could also make a heart locket with a picture of your beloved and an inscription.

Make a personal powerpoint

If you and your beloved use powerpoint in your day-jobs, why not make some slides on how cool they are? The more you stick with company-style industry-speak for this, the better. Send the powerpoint to them as an attachment in a formal, jargon-laden email (or, if you can, arrange to present it to them while wearing a suit).

About.com has a (somewhat disturbingly detailed) tutorial on every step of making a "Valentine" presentation, including appropriate templates (see our own, somewhat offbeat valentine cards).

Find a reason to celebrate

Every day with your beloved should be special. And with the internet, you can figure out why. Find out why today is an important day, then use that as the nugget for some silliness.

The web is full of this day in history sites which list significant events on today's date in past years. If you dig through, you can usually find a cause for celebration. For example, as I write this, it is apparently the anniversary of when "Hawaii's monarchy was overthrown as a group of businessmen and sugar planters forced Queen Liliuokalani to abdicate." Everyone sends their beloved birthday cards and valentine cards, but only someone very special sends them an overthrow-of-Queen-Liliukalani card. Or, for Valentine's day, you could celebrate:

• The first trainload of oranges leaves Los Angeles (February 14, 1886)
• Edward Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, becomes the first member of the British royal family to ride in an automobile (February 14, 1896)
• Aretha Franklin tapes “RESPECT” (February 14, 1967)

(facts gathered from the History Channel and Scopesys sites). See our suggested cards for these occasions. You can find lots of other quirky excuses for celebration online. Here are some of the funner ones we've run across (or flat-out invented), with a link to an example usage:

• Meetaversary: an anniversary of a first meeting.
• Dateaversary: an anniversary of a first date.
• Kissaversary: an anniversary of a first kiss. A suggested alternative name is annikissary.
• Electroversary: an anniversary celebrated a year before the event (because electrons have a charge of “-1″). For example, one year before a planned wedding during a long engagement.
• Postaversary: hitting a significant number (such as 100) of blog posts.
• Blogaversary: an anniversary of starting a blog.
• Post-liver-transplant-aversary: exactly what it says. A cause for celebration indeed.
• Binaversary: an anniversary or birthday celebrated at 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, … years.
• Cataversary: an anniversary of getting a cat.
• Fooaversary: an anniversary of some random thing.

Do some photo manipulation

Place your face in a romantic or funny scene. Online, you can use zingfu for this. If you want more freedom, you'll need a drawing program. Just about any drawing program is good enough for this, such as Photoshop (commercial) or GIMP (free and open). Movie posters are a great source of romantic scenes. Here's a small selection done by some makesweet employees:

For finding images of posters, try Google images. There are plenty of sites devoted to movie posters, but frankly it gets a bit boring how hard they try to sell you things.

If you want to produce an actual printed version of your photo in a variety of interesting styles, check out photofiddle.

Send unusual email, and lots of it

Your beloved is probably used to getting email from you all the time. But lets face it, that email is probably not the work of a Shakespeare or Wodehouse. For a special time like Valentine's day or a birthday, with a bit of planning, you can do better. A lot better. Plan ahead and prepare several romantic emails that are a bit out of the ordinary. Send them at a regular interval leading up to the event, culminating at some natural point, such as a date.

There are plenty of sites out there that will write rather eccentric love letters for you, for example Blue Swami and Crazy Horoscopes. Romantic quotes make good material too; they are all over the web. You can also use the lyrics of romantic songs. Wouldn't you agree? Baby you and me. We've got a groovy kind of love. A groovy kind of love.

Poetry also makes great copy - oldpoetry in particular is a good source for unusual gems:

If I could write words
Like leaves on an autumn forest floor,
What a bonfire my letters would make.
If I could speak words of water,
You would drown when I said
“I love you.”  (Spike Milligan)

Another possibility is pick-up lines. One per hour, for a week. You can get fairly decent pick-up lines at linesthataregood. We like the Beavis and Butthead ones. For the emailing, it helps if you know how to program. We'd help you out with that, except ... you know ... coming from anyone but you to your honey, that's spam!

We have some tips on love letters and links to examples on our love letters page.

Send an e-card

You won't win many points for imagination, but you could always send an e-card or two. Reasonable sites include American Greetings, Sugarqube, Hallmark, Blue Mountain, etc.

The flowers2mail service is a very nice, very professional, very fun tool for creating a virtual bouquet to send by email. The catch? There doesn't seem to be one. The site claims to be “built just for fun and has no commercial goals, (c) ronald craenen - à ma belle marijn”. Now that's romantic...

If you want to go off the beaten track a little bit, you could try sending a love message encoded with our Code Quacker. This takes your message and encrypts it in a vocabulary of your choice. For example, “Snuggle snuggle. Cuddle cuddle smooch kiss hug. Smooch cuddle smooch tickle cuddle wriggle tickle! Hug tickle snuggle. Smooch wriggle! Tickle hug wriggle. Smooch hug. Kiss wriggle hug wriggle! Cuddle smooch kiss hug cuddle kiss kiss hug hug smooch smooch! Kiss wriggle cuddle.” means “Wanna go out?”. Use your own judgement about whether this kind of thing would amuse or annoy your honey.

We've also started collecting a list of codes and ciphers, including flag semaphore, hobo sign, and decoder rings, all of which have some romantic potential if you are inventive.

Rename your mate

Every day for a week, change the nickname you use for your beloved. The lists online seem rather boring, so here is our own effort: Chuckle-cheeks. Goose-bumps. Pookie-snooks. Poptart. Jiggles McJiggypants. Twinkle-toes. Nuzzle-nose. Snugglepuss. Dumble-dear. Fishbreath. Fishbreath? (more romantic petnames here)

For more conventional nicknames see lovingyou.com or getromantic.com.

Make a puzzle

Make a customized crossword that only your beloved could solve, at the oddly-named armoredpenguin. Put in their name, your name, where you first met, what you did, and so on. Make it a challenge. You could also make a word search or a word scramble on the same site.

Other ideas

We've concentrated on ideas that are network-enabled, but don't forget that you can never go far wrong sending a hand-written love letter, or showing up in person with flowers and chocolate - well, as long as you make sure the flowers are local and organic, and the chocolate is dark and fair-trade! (we've some tips on Responsible Romance you might also want to read).

You should also learn how to be romantic if you don't already know, or get romantic stuff delivered if you believe in straight materialism over philosophy.

You might also be interested in reading:

• How to write sweet notes - tips for what to write in emails, letters, and cards.
• Love letter tips - how to know if you are writing a good love letter.

Do you have any suggestions?