People Share The Best Ways They've Ever Surprised Their Significant Other

A few years back, a friend of mine came home after a long day of work to find that her husband had cleaned the entire apartment from top to bottom, had ordered her favorite takeout cuisine, and picked out a selection of different wines. It was a lovely thing to see and immediately made her feel better, she mentioned, after another crappy day at her crappy job. (She later left that job and trust me, she's doing so much better now.) Even better: That night brought them closer together. They'd been going through a bit of a rough patch and would later renew their vows.

After Redditor Solid_V asked the online community, "What was the best way you surprised your girlfriend?" people told us about the things they've done for their significant others that brightened up their respective days.

"When she was sad..."

When she was sad about having to get a new passport and lose all her stamps, I vectorized the stamps and had a couch pillow printed with all of them overlaid on an old vintage map. It turned out great and she cried when she saw it.

ckuiper

Fantastic!

A great gift for the passionate traveler.

"I didn't talk about it..."

Pretended I forgot about Valentine's Day. I didn't talk about it the previous few days, then the night before I snuck into her car and filled it with stuffed animals, flowers, a card, and chocolates. She had to work early in the morning and found everything when she got into her car before work. She came back into the house crying.

ChaseDonovan

This is cute!

The kind of thing that can make the rest of your day. (Also: screw working early.)

"I drove six hours..."

I drove six hours to see her at college. We both moved away for school, I moved to Virginia and she moved to Tennessee. One night I decided I missed her way too much and drove from VA at 2am so I'd be there after she woke up.

She texted me about how much she wished she could see me and how much she hated being away from each other and I kinda just texted back "haha about that" lol ended up staying there for a week and going on dates every night.

kevinb275

"When we first met..."

When we first met I told her we were going camping for the weekend, about a 3 hour drive away.

On the way I said I needed to pee and pulled over in the middle of nowhere at a 5-star hotel. We walked in to reception and as she was about to ask where the bathroom was I pulled out my credit card and said "We'd like to check in please..."

She loved it! Which is good because it cost me my last cents. We're now married and usually go camping, not to swanky hotels.

Jimmyfromthepieshop

"I got to her apartment..."

I was in the Army living in Hawaii while she was in the upper-Midwest for college. Decided I wanted to visit her and I colluded with her roommate to figure out the best week for that. I put in a leave request and told her I'd be out doing training (glorified camping) for a week so I wouldn't be able to text much.

I got to her apartment and her roommate let me in while she was out at class. When she got home, she just started ranting to her roommate for a good 15 seconds not really looking over. When she finally did look over she just stopped in her tracks and stared at me with my "dumb goofy smile." Took her a bit to realize I was real and quite a bit longer before she finally stopped squeezing me to death.

Flashdime

"I made a rap song..."

I made a rap song for our one year anniversary, and she listens to it everyday if she ever misses my voice! Definitely one of the most things I am proud of making for anyone.

jacobjz

This is personal and thoughtful.

Who wouldn't appreciate it?

"We don't live together..."

We don't live together, but she usually spends her weekends at my place.

That one time, I went to pick her up, but instead of going back to my place, I took her on a trip to my parents' vacation home.

I_hate_traveling

Look at Mr. Moneybags over here...

...with a vacation home!

Just teasing––great for you both. Nothing like a nice getaway.

"She's sometimes very shy..."

By asking her out. She's sometimes very shy and had no idea I was interested in her because before now we were and still are best friends but yeah I was giving her hints and she wasn't picking up on them.

TheMegaGamer768

"We just pointed at stuff..."

Took her on a private plane ride for her birthday. We just pointed at stuff and the pilot would swoop over it.

p38-lighting

"My birthday..."

My birthday was just a couple of weeks ago. I had been trying to make plans with my friends for a nice, very drunk night at my place, but everyone was busy that weekend. I had decided to maybe have a really lame birthday and celebrate the next week. My SO had me distracted for most of the afternoon, and when I came home everyone was there! I'm 23 and I had my first surprise party! And for reference, my SO is terrible at keeping secrets. She usually gives me Christmas/birthday presents as soon as she buys them because she can't wait to show me. It was wonderful. They had filled about 200 balloons in my tiny apartment, and we all got loud and drunk and filled the bathroom with balloons. I really loved it.

DLumps09

"He absolutely loved it."

My boyfriend's birthday was earlier this month, so I surprised him by making a video compilation of friends and family wishing him a happy birthday. He absolutely loved it!

Storyteller13

"My wife was turning thirty..."

My wife was turning thirty and was feeling wistful about her twenties. In the four month leading up to her birthday I downloaded all of her old Livejournal entries (about a hundred and fifty printed pages, all told), formatted them and had them bound. She used to post mixtape tracklists back in college, and I found and burned each of those onto supplementary discs. The money and time investment was a lot, but it was a gift that both showed her how far she had come and how we were entering into a new decade of life as husband and wife.

[deleted]

Thoughtful!

Many happy returns to you both!

"He walked into his sister's house..."

My (then) husband and I got married and had our daughter in March of that year in AZ. He was then stationed to VA a month later. He was going on deployment soon after, so I stayed in AZ with my family. In June for Father's Day, I secretly flew to VA and met his sister, whose husband (also stationed in VA) had driven to the naval base to pick up my husband to visit for the weekend. He walked into his sister's house and saw me and our 3-month-old daughter sitting on the couch. He nearly tripped over the armchair to get to us.

That was a great surprise.

Something_More

Spontaneity helps relationships a lot.

"Adding a healthy dose of spontaneity keeps the monotony at bay and can strengthen a relationship through good and bad times," Katherine Jane, relationship coach and founder of Never Too Late, told Huffington Post UK in 2015. "Couples and people are constantly changing, so keeping spontaneity alive in a relationship helps both people grow with each other through new-found interests and reduces the risk of growing apart."

Which is to say: Go for it! You'll thank yourself later.

Have some stories of your own? Feel free to tell us about them in the comments below!

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People Share Unspoken First Date Rules Everyone Should Follow

Reddit user Quotedkarma asked: 'What's an unspoken rule on a first date?'

Two people having coffee
Photo by Chewy on Unsplash

Countless emotions arise when going on a first date.

Making this all the more difficult is that a first date is one of the few things that absolutely must be done solo, so bringing friends as backup simply isn't an option.

Leaving one to wish there was a handbook for navigating a first date successfully.

Of course, while there is no official guide, everyone has rules and beliefs about what to do and what to avoid on a first date.

From how to effortlessly bring out your best qualities, to a foolproof escape plan if your date is anything but the one you've dreamed your whole life of meeting.

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woman in white t-shirt looking at the window during daytime
Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash

My second college internship led me to a small content creation company. It was so small that the two editors were the only paid employees. Everyone else was an intern.

I was excited to start so I could add more to my portfolio only to realize that one of the editors replaced my name with hers every time she edited one of my articles. Not much of the content was changed, but I was too shy to question it.

I eventually found out that she did this to all the interns, and most of the interns had learned to private message their draft articles to the other editor, who did not take the bylines.

I asked one of my fellow interns if the founder of the company knew the editor took bylines. Turns out, the founder knew, but for some reason no one else could figure out, the editor never got fired.

It turns out this story isn't unique. There are lots of instances when someone does something at work that should get them fired, but they manage to hold on to their job. Redditors have plenty of stories like that and are eager to share.

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Not to startle any of you, but death stalks us.

We all have nightmares about diseases and murderers.

But what if, in the end, we just choke on a pickle we inhaled too fast?

Maybe instead of a pickle, a little coleslaw would have been the wiser choice.

We'll never know.

The most minute things can send us packing.

Redditor SuffocatedByThighs wanted to discuss the things that can extinguish our lives in the most basic ways, so they asked:

"What simple mistake has ended lives?"

Tripping over untied shoelaces.

It can break your neck.

TIE YOUR SHOES!!!

Off the Rocks

On No Falling GIF by Outside TVGiphy

"There have been too many instances of rock climbers rappelling off of the ends of their ropes, which could have been easily avoided by tying stopper knots at the ends of their ropes."

LZRDLZRD

Seconds

"I worked at a tire place for a summer and the first thing they told me was 'See that torque wrench? One mistake with this and you can kill a whole family in a matter of seconds.' I thought well, better take this thing seriously."

FrenchMicrowave

"Man for a second I was thinking 'F**k you'd have to swing that thing around fast to take out an entire family' and just bluescreened on the idea of changing a tire."

lurking_my_a**_off

How Vexing...

"THERAC-25. The world’s deadliest software error. Cost several radiation patients their lives by administering lethal amounts of radiation, and for a while, the doctors didn’t even know."

Longjumping_Event_59

"THERAC-25 suffered a particularly vexing sort of error known as a race condition. Essentially, the circuit required multiple inputs in a particular sequence, but sometimes the timing of that sequence could get thrown out of whack and it would lead to all sorts of nonsensical output."

"This is less than ideal when all you're doing is manipulating pixels, but when your software is handling radiation beams you really don't want this to happen."

"Even more vexing is that race conditions are frequently heisenbugs, which can vanish altogether when one attempts to study them. If you don't have a good idea of what's causing the error, you may never cotton on to what sort of bad input is required to test it. Under those circumstances, it's easy to write them off as imaginary, only to then find."

dancingmadkoschei

Heavy Drifting

"Leaving the stranded vehicle on the road in winter and trying to walk to get help. It happens in rural parts of our province once or twice a year and they find the body a few days later. They get disoriented and freeze."

Regina_Runner

"I got blown off a road in high winds. Heavy drifting. Less than a mile from a friend's house after I had turned around. Drifts made it impossible to complete the trip. Trying to run a mile in full blizzard conditions was a fight for my life as an in-shape 24-year-old male athlete.

"rotyag

Simple Slips

Uh Oh Omg GIF by BounceGiphy

"Almost any simple mistake can end a life if you're an anesthesiologist, that's how my grandpa died in his early 60s."

dwserps

Any second. Any moment.

Stay vigilant people.

Celibacy could be better...

Oh My Wow GIFGiphy

"Not being honest with doctors about Viagra. It has many dangerous drug interactions and can cause a lot of problems from what I’ve heard. Trust me the doctor ain’t gonna judge you guys, they have seen many more embarrassing things. And it would suck to die because you wanted to hide something just for it to be later stated in your death certificate."

The_upsetti_spagetti

Check the Numbers

"As a healthcare worker, giving the wrong amount of insulin."

UzumakiHorror

"During the first shift of my first clinical rotation in nursing school, I watched a nurse draw up insulin out of an auto-injector pen that was CLEARLY marked to specifically not do that AND she was drastically wrong about the dosage and almost killed a guy by giving him essentially like a hundred times the intended dose."

someguynamedg

Stay In

"Pulling the knife out of someone."

rcadephantom

"Yeah, I did that but it was a broken tree branch that had impaled my leg. Without even thinking I pulled it out. Blood started gushing so I pulled off my shirt and tied it into a pressure bandage. I was lucky I didn’t bleed to death."

Olddog_Newtricks2001

"Shock is an IQ reducer. I once sliced a bit off the side of my hand with a broken glass, and sort of dazedly picked off the piece of me and tried to stick it back on. It did not work."

UncannyTarotSpread

Stay Dirty

"Mixing cleaning ingredients."

Jonnysource

"My dad was trying to unclog his kitchen drain and mixed drain cleaners by adding one then adding another a few minutes later. It started bubbling and he began coughing intensely. I heard him coughing from the other room, saw what happened, and opened the nearby window to get rid of the chlorine gas he just produced."

"I forgot there was a large hive of wasps that had moved into that window and they did not appreciate this unexpected interruption. I took him to the emergency room for the gas exposure and it was tough explaining that the wasp stings were not why we were there."

CharmingTuber

Dear God

Jeff Goldblum What GIF by The Late Late Show with James CordenGiphy

"A friend’s husband locked himself out of their home. He tried to get in through a window that had security bars. While squeezing through his foot slipped and he essentially hung himself on the window sill."

Cokej01

Life is fleeting. Here is proof.

LIVE!! But live smart.

We all have foods that we like or don't like, and depending on how passionately we feel, it may be pretty hard to understand why someone likes a food that otherwise grosses us out.

But if that food is also expensive, we'll also be left wondering why they'd spend so much money on that dish.

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