As wonderful as it is to give someone a gift they truly like, it also tends to be a pretty stressful endeavor.
And whether that’s because what they want is hard to get or we simply have no idea what they want, it’s hard not to second guess ourselves and worry that what we pick out for someone will just disappoint them.
That’s especially true when it comes to children, but some people can underestimate how much that can happen within a couple as well. And that’s why my parents agreed not to buy each other anything unless they were sure they’d really like it.
As my mom put it, “Why spend a bunch of money on stuff that neither of us will end up liking?”
But while the cost didn’t appear to be a problem that one husband had, a recent story told by his wife shows the same can’t be said for his priorities.
Over their three years together, the couple we’ll be hearing about has agreed to set aside some of their own personal money to buy each other gifts at Christmas.
And as the wife explained in a Reddit post , this Christmas marks the first that she and her husband will have spent since they first got married.
But recently, she happened to stumble upon a list he had made in which he revealed both who he was planning to buy gifts for and what he was looking to get for them.
And what she found was that there was a serious mismatch between the effort he put into everyone else’s gift versus hers.
For instance, one coworker was set to get a $600 watch, one friend would get $900 worth of workout equipment, and he was planning to give his sister-in-law a $250 bracelet.
All told, he was looking to spend upwards of $5,000 on his friends and coworkers.
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Meanwhile, what was she getting? A $20 set of stainless steel kitchen spoons.
As the woman said, “I was too shocked to ignore this and I had a confrontation with him about it.”
But when she did, what he had to say wasn’t any more encouraging for her.
In addition to reaffirming that he controls what he gets to spend on who, he said that the people he was getting more expensive gifts for were important to him and that he had known them for a long time.
He also told her that any gift should be appreciated no matter what it costs. And it didn’t seem to matter that his wife had bought him stuff from his favorite shoe and gaming brands.
In the woman’s words, “He got upset and said I was acting like an ungrateful, spoiled brat and urged me to get rid of this attitude.”
This confrontation led the woman to ask if she overreacted, but her problem here was as clear to the Reddit community she contacted as it was to her.
In fact, they largely felt that both this gift disconnect and the way he justified it raised some red flags about their relationship.
As one user put it , ” Wow! His friends and co-workers are important to him, but you are not? He’s known them forever? I think you can already see where this marriage is going.”
Others were suspicious of how much he was spending on these friends and wondered what the intentions were behind these lavish gifts.
In the words of another person, “Even if he was buying you an expensive gift as well, these gifts to coworkers seem inapropriate. Are they bribes? Also him calling you an ungrateful spoiled brat is completely uncalled for.”
And while the woman didn’t answer any questions about these friends and coworkers, others wondered if there was a possibility he could be cheating on her with one of them.
In any case, they figured that at the very least, it was high time for the woman to return her expensive gifts and respond in kind with her own $20 present.
h/t: Reddit | MerryChristmasAA