More tales of woe. As a young teen we neighbor girls planned a surprise summer birthday party for one of us- a girl one year and one day older than me. Feeling a bit out of it but they gave me gifts too (inexpensive of course- one was a huge Sweetart).
Sometimes outside forces take away from a personal event. First anniversary, young (30’s), Sunday, no kids, neither on call… Planned a leisurely morning with an evening dinner out. Saturday H got the call from his partner- he had a high fever and no one else could do the out of town ACLS course Sunday. So H went early Sunday morning and there went my romantic fantasies.
So A VERY HAPPY XXTH BIRTHDAY to all when it comes. Thoughtfulness from women friends- including gag gifts such as a box of snack bags since I use them to organize stuff in my purse… Gotta think of the positives.
Shortly after I turned 50, I was offered the senior discount at a local thrift shop. That went over well. (I was polite)
I’m not really into accumulating more stuff, so I organized a party and asked the invitees to bring a bottle of a favorite wine. That gift kept on giving for quite some time!
I find I’m doing more and more solo. Yes, I want to see that movie. Yes, I do enjoy an hour long walk with the dog listening to an audiobook. Yes, I want to go to the exhibit at the museum and take the time to read every. single. sign.
Until a better companion comes along, I’m going by myself! No hard feelings. Life is short.
“Those in the “just tell them what you want camp” mean well (and do know how to keep the peace) but I think it’s missing the point. The point is: feeling that there is someone in the world who wants to do this without being told.”
I’m not unsympathetic to the OP’s and others’ frustrations and disappointments, but these types of threads remind me that there are different ways to show and accept love. I’m definitely not a new-agey type person and not a big one for self-help type books but I’ve always found the Love Languages stuff helpful and meaningful. We all have our strengths and weaknesses and the whole gift giving thing is not immune to that. I also think we are often scripted by our own personalities and childhoods when it comes to gift giving.
My spouse shows his love through quality time, acts of service, and physical touch. We’re not a couple who puts much weight into gift giving. It is harder in a relationship when each one’s styles of showing and wanting displays of love don’t mesh.
I was on a cruise with an out of state close friend because H didn’t want to do a cruise. GF and I were on the cruise during the 10th wedding anniversary. A few years later friend died of a brain aneurysm, so in hindsight I was glad we had the trip together.
H and I were with relatives in Switzerland for my 30th birthday.
Being married and happy on all the other normal days - one has to take what one can get. However the kids do need to learn as they become adults how the street goes both ways.
Last week, I attended an all-day seminar given by a life coach. It was excellent. The thing the woman said that stood out the most to me was, “We all live with manuals. That is, we all have instruction manuals in our minds - for other people! We expect them to live by these manuals. That’s not fair, because they don’t know what’s in the manuals!” So when you catch yourself thinking, “I thought he would…” or “He should have known…” realize that he might NOT know what you expect him to do.
This tip has already helped me this week. Instead of stewing when my husband suggested something I thought he should have known I didn’t want to do, I told him how I felt. Later, he thanked me for being honest!
^ I think that is at the core of it. My H never wants to celebrate birthdays- he gets moody and wants the day to be over. I love the thought of being pampered and gushed over for one single day a year. I still think each person can try to accommodate the other person’s wishes.
@Nurse001- a late Happy Birthday! I’m sorry it was a disappointing one and I totally understand. Even if you don’t normally go big for birthdays, it would be nice to be surprised with something special for a significant one. I do make a big deal about birthdays- stretch them out for a week, put up banners and posters, make a cake, etc. Presents are not a big deal as we both kind of buy what we want, but I still try to think of something unique for my husband each year (a party at an indoor soccer field with his soccer friends on his 50th, and a 1-hour ocean flight at sunset in an ultralight this year).
My husband is not good at birthdays and I had several birthdays in the early years that were very disappointing. I have learned to make it easy for him. I put up a couple of Happy Birthday banners for myself, plan a dinner out or tell him he will be barbecuing for the family, and I text him a list of fun gifts just in case. My kids are really good about helping him out. It has kind of become a joke, and he actually gets into it more this way. It is a little more work, but way better than sitting around feeling sorry for myself every year!
Definitely, but those wishes have to be verbalized concretely. “Something big” isn’t specific enough. To a spouse, that might mean “surprise party,” when that’s the last thing you would want.
Yes, @doschicos, it’s true about the different ways to show and to want to receive love… (for me, it’s not necessarily about receiving a material gift at all…it could be a gesture or an experience or a very simple material gift with some meaning that shows thought marking an occasion…whether it’s touching or funny or useful. It’s just that, if it’s a gift…truly a gift…shouldn’t that mean that the one giving is extending himself/herself to the one receiving…to try to be a little attuned to this other person ? Short of the giver having little ability to understand the other’s preferences (i.e., autism) shouldn’t the giver try to understand the heart’s desire of the loved one? If it’s mostly about the convenience or preferences of the giver, or just something to check off a to-do list in a dutiful way, then what makes it a gift?
It sounds as if your spouse does give you thoughtful gifts in his quality time, acts of service and physical touch, and that this is a happy mesh for you . Those actions show a fine attunement to another human being and really are way better than any chotchke or accessory to unwrap !
Yeah, @inthegarden, I don’t think love languages replace one’s need to commit to fulfilling a partner’s needs and desires, but it helps provide a helpful framework for understanding and accepting one another’s different styles. It shouldn’t let someone of the hook necessarily but can be a good basis for understanding where someone is coming from and starting a dialogue about it.
Even the different responses to this thread are an indication of how different we all are when it comes to giving and receiving gifts.
Yeah, but a lot of the time, many of us blow it. And then what’s the recipient supposed to do? Fake liking the gift?
My husband bought me a hot-air popcorn popper for Christmas. He had noticed that since I joined Weight Watchers last spring, I’ve been eating the little 100-calorie snack bags of low-fat microwave popcorn as my evening snack almost every night. He thought the hot-air popper would be a good idea because the popcorn wouldn’t smell funny and wouldn’t be liable to scorching like the microwave kind. But in fact, it was a terrible gift. The reason I like the little bags of microwave popcorn is the automatic portion control they provide. I hate using the hot-air popper because it makes too much popcorn and thus tempts me to eat too much popcorn, which sabotages my diet.
But what am I supposed to do? He meant well. He put thought into the gift. It’s not his fault that I hate it and that it’s making it more difficult for me to lose weight. I want to go back to eating the microwave popcorn in the little bags, but that would hurt his feelings. And this gift-giving thing is all about feelings.
Exactly. Gift giving isn’t that easy without some guidance from the recipient. We have had many threads and posts that confirm this besides this one.
“shouldn’t the giver try to understand the heart’s desire of the loved one?”
^This is a pretty high hurdle or expectation, but there I go being a pragmatist again.
@marian:
With gifts I try and look at the intent of the gift giver. I have gotten some crappy gifts from people where I know they simply didn’t care, and to be honest would rather not get a gift from them (a lot of times, I will tell people I didn’t want any gifts, and would be careful to say I was telling everyone this, especially friends and such who I knew were financially limited).
I think with your husband, he meant well and there may be a simple way to use the hot air popper (which is going to be lower calorie, no oil used at all). There are figures for how many calories are in a cup of popcorn, and there also likely are how much kernels you need to make that much. Air popped popcorn is 31 calories a cup, so you could make 3 cups of it (prob a lot more than the microwave makes). That would be 2 tablesoons of popcorn kernels, which is easy enough to measure out:)
In the 40 years I’ve been married, I’ve only given my husband an unprompted gift that was a true winner once.
When the new energy-saving light bulbs came out, he hated them. He complained about them frequently, especially after our local stores stopped selling the old bulbs. So I hunted around online, found an obscure retailer who still had some of the old bulbs, and bought enough of them to supply all the lamps in our house for about 5 years. I gave him the huge box of light bulbs on the next gift-giving occasion. He loved it.
But that’s once in 40 years. It will probably never happen again, even though I know him very, very well.
I miss my husband’s late stepmother. She was a wonderful person to buy gifts for. She loved Godiva chocolates but considered them too expensive to buy for herself. So you could always buy her a gift she would truly appreciate. But most people aren’t like that.
Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes! I know my H thought he did good but it just hurt my feelings. Regarding hints, last week I sent him a email about this great cabin in the mountains that I would like to visit well that hint went right out the window or I need a body message hint! I just always believed when giving a present whether big or small thought should always be put behind it. Price is not an issue ever as it could cost 1.00. Also I have always encourged homemade cards and gifts from the kids because its fun watching them come up with things. Guess I expected to much from them though. Oh well Happy Birthday to me
I don’t think it’s missing the point at all. The point of looking at it from a different perspective is to appreciate what they are doing every day. But my DH does meander through rose gardens and museums with me if that’s what I want, so maybe it’s not just the behaviors around holidays that need work.
I used to have a SIL for whom everything was a big test. She wouldn’t tell my BIL what she wanted and if he didn’t guess right, she was unhappy. That’s a very stressful way to live and it’s no fun for anyone. I think there has to be some sort of middle ground, but we have to be honest about others’ limitations too. If they can’t remember dates, it’s unfair to hold forgetting our birthdays against them. And if they make an effort that’s not perfect, maybe it would help to try to appreciate the effort more than the result. If they seem not to care what your preferences are, then I think the gifts (or lack of them) are a symptom and not the actual problem.
@Nurse001, Have your children been involved in buying gifts for their dad or other family members? I’ve always included mine in the planning and selection of gifts for our family. When they were little, I took them to the discount store and gave them $1 for each person, just like my parents did when my siblings and I were young. They had a lot of fun shopping for something each person would really like.
As they got older, I helped them create a shopping list and gave each a budget. And I created a daddy/kiddo shopping day for them to shop for me. The children now remind their dad because it’s a fun day (shopping, lunch, maybe laser tag) and I get the gift I really want – my family spending time together and the entire house to myself for a few hours. But it’s a learned behavior.
Try this for Mother’s Day. A week or two ahead mention to each family member that it’s coming up. Ask them if they think it would be fun to have a BBQ or a family dinner at a restaurant. The idea is to get them talking about possibilities you might like. Tell each one that if the other 2 ask about gifts, you might like x, y, or z. Give each one a separate x, y, z so they have lots of choices. The week before, suggest that your husband take the children out on a lunch/shopping expedition so they can spend time together. Then praise whatever effort they make. Repeat the exercise for Father’s Day, and everyone’s birthday. The way to change a behavior you don’t like is to replace it with one you do.
@Nurse001 boy do I feel your pain. For my 50th birthday, I heard from only one of my three children, no presents, no cards and my husband was out of town. He, at least did send me flowers. Mad me sad but I wasn’t surprised. I blame my husband somewhat as my holidays (Mother’s Day, birthdays, anniversaries) are never a big deal to him but all three were adults at the time so really no excuse.
Well, I hope I’m not being misunderstood. What I’m talking about is not to be a diva/high-maintenance person, who expects others to know the precise object of desire and fulfill that…and woe to anyone who doesn’t get it. And I’m certainly not about having those expectations on a regular basis.
Take, for example, Miriam’s anecdote about the popcorn-popper. It’s a good example to describe the mine-field of mistakes well-meaning people can get into. While the gift presents a frustrating dilemma for her, she can understood it in the spirit the gift was given. It puts her into the conumdrum of what to do about it, but I seriously doubt she would feel hurt or offended by the gift. It’s pretty clear her husband was putting thought into doing something nice, even if he lacked enough information to make the right choice. The thought he must have put into it was still lovely! It shows he noticed something about her even if he didn’t get it all.
What I’m talking about is understanding (and caring to understand) whether your nearest and dearest tends to be a pragmatic person, a romantic person, a spontaneous experience person, or an enjoyer of familiar things, etc, and to choose more-or-less accordingly. Also, to notice…is there a type of lack in their life at the time that could be fulfilled (i.e., too much stress could mean doing their chores for a few days and maybe going to a B&B or a spa. Not enough fun lately could translate into doing something zany, or just a nice hike or picnic or movie.) No one can anticipate someone’s needs all the time (and shouldn’t) But isn’t a little occasional spoiling…in effect saying “I notice you and I ‘get’ you”… what a gift is all about? To me, it could be as simple as a bowlful of strawberries, But beautiful ones! And I certainly wouldn’t whine if they’re blueberries or tangerines instead. Aren’t relationships all about noticing what the other is about? It’s the noticing that’s the real gift.
If one person in the family is doing all the noticing and celebrating of the others, I think there’s a real unbalance. So often (but not always!) it’s the mom.
. Those actions show a fine attunement to another human being and really are way better than any chotchke or accessory to unwrap !
