I'll start with a stereotype: when it comes to Valentine's day, in my experience, it is the women who spend time searching for the perfect gift and a thoughtful card, and it is the men who mumble under their breath about the 'commercialisation' of Valentine's, whilst paying through the nose for a last minute bunch of red roses.

But I recently came across an interesting piece of research on gift giving which might shed some more light on this. In 2008, Dunne at el looked at gift giving in relationships and differences between genders.

Interestingly, they found that women who gave men poor gifts were perceived less positively than those who gave better gifts. No real surprises there then! However, when the experiment was reversed, women were relatively unaffected by whether the quality of the gift was good or bad. Their perception of the man giving the gift didn't change.

So, is the stereotype true? Could it be that women buy nice gifts as they know/have experienced the consequences of poor ones? Have men come to realise that for most women the quality just doesn't matter? Before the male readers strike Valentine's gifts off the 'to do' list, read on...

These results were only short term and they didn't measure the longer term impact on ongoing relationships. What we know in general is that although good gifts don't necessarily make a relationship better, poor gifts can have a negative impact. Poor gifts can highlight how different we are to our partner and can, therefore, damage relationships ("he/she just doesn't understand me ...")

So, when you're picking your Valentine's gift this year, take a second to think about if you're in it for the short term or the long haul - and choose wisely!