My boyfriend won’t stop bragging about the awful gift he’s working on

I (20F) became exclusive with my boyfriend (21M) in late October after a quite frankly awful date. Since we started dating (2 months ago), I’ve made most of the first moves, initiated everything, paid for 70% of our outings, given him gifts, and planned most of the dates. I had to search around the city we both live in to find a hotel for HIM to stay at and manually input the address to calculate distance into Google Maps for him once. I didn’t mind too much at first, but it slowly became something that quietly crept up on me as a dislike. I’ve talked to him about this before, and the only thing I’ve ever asked him to do was take initiative and plan some dates.

October comes around, and I planned a Halloween themed date for us: we were supposed to go out to dinner at a restaurant I’d picked because he loves ramen and then to a haunted farm event. A few days before the date, I saw a cute trend on TikTok of people making “boo baskets” for their significant others, so I thought it would be cute to put together a little boo basket and surprise him with it the day of the date. I filled a basket with his favorite candies, some trinkets from his favorite media (Star Wars, Minecraft, Adventure Time, etc), and wrote a sweet message wishing him Happy Halloween on a Mandalorian themed card.

When I brought him the gift on the day of our date, I’m not entirely certain what I was expecting, but he didn’t react the way that I thought he would. He awkwardly put it on the nightstand of the hotel room and proceeded to start fondling me without even looking at it. I laughed it off and told him to open it, and he looked at all the items individually, kind of nodded at me, and read the note in complete silence.

Instead of saying thank you or commenting on the gift at all, he started lamenting the fact that he hadn’t gotten ME anything and beating himself up for it. He only said thank you after I prodded him about the gift itself and then picked me up, put me on the bed, clearly wanting to start doing something else instead.

Fast forward to a week later, he’s done a lot of talking about gifts and giving them. He’s mentioned about three times now that he thought about giving me flowers, but still has never gotten me flowers. Initially, he said that he was going to make me a boo basket too, and I told him that I didn’t give a boo basket with the intention of receiving anything in return: I thought it might make him smile to get something thoughtful themed around his interests, plus it’s a holiday gift. Nothing big.

So he scrapped that… and started repeatedly hinting at a “really big gift” over the phone until I gave in and asked what he was working on. His newest thing, and his idea of a good gift to me, is a composition notebook that he is currently in the process of filling front to back with “how he feels about me”. He told me he was working on this about a week ago and I didn’t really know how to react.

I feel bad because I don’t really want… that. My hesitance must have shown when he initially told me because he instantly started beating himself up and saying it was a “stupid idea” and “I didn’t want it anyway”. I reassured him, despite me not, in fact, wanting that as a gift, and now he mentions his progress on the notebook almost every day and calls it a manifesto. I don’t really know how to explain to him that I’m just looking for consistency, stability, and maturity in a partner, and when I asked for “initiative”, this… is not what I meant.

Even worse is the fact that on a surface level, it makes me feel really bad to complain about. If he was meeting all my basic needs AND making this gift, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. It’s still just not something I’d really want in general, and I feel like he’s only doing it to pat himself on the back with no consideration for what I enjoy or what I want. The fact that I even have to explain this to him at all is honestly irritating.