Birthday messages for your best friend (not a meme)
Birthday messages for a best friend: the joke first and the true bit second, questions that find it, and examples to change.
Your best friend has had a lot of birthday messages from you. Some were memes. One was a voice note of you singing at a bus stop. At least one arrived the day after.
This year, try a line that is actually about them. You can still be funny. You just have to be funny about something true.
The joke goes first, the true bit goes second
The best best-friend messages are a joke and then a turn.
"Happy birthday to the only person who has seen me cry at a car advert. Twice. I would be lost without you."
The joke earns the soft bit. The soft bit is the one they screenshot.
Questions that find the true bit
- What do they do that nobody else would bother to?
- When did they turn up without being asked?
- What will the two of you be doing at eighty?
- What are they quietly proud of that nobody mentions?
Examples to change
Borrow the shape. Put your own story in it.
Happy birthday. You are still the first person I tell anything to, including things that are none of your business.
Another year of you remembering my coffee order and forgetting your own keys. Never change.
Twenty years, three flats, one very bad fringe (mine). Happy birthday to my favourite witness.
I have never had to explain myself to you. That is the best present anybody has given me, and it wasn't even my birthday.
Your cake is on its way. Your present is me. It is non-refundable.
When you have known them forever
The longer you have been friends, the less you say it. Long friendships run on shorthand. Once a year, write the long version: one sentence about what the friendship has been, not only what they have been like this year.
When everybody is in on it
For a big birthday, get the whole group writing. A group birthday card goes round as one link, everybody writes a line in their own words, and it opens on the day.
When it isn't their birthday
The best messages are usually the ones sent for no reason. If you keep thinking of things to say to one person, tbf is where you will write them down, and they keep them. The iPhone app is coming soon.
Make the joke. Then say the true thing. Then stop, before it gets weird.