Still pondering a gift situation from over the recent holidays.
I’m 30f, he’s 31m, and we’ve been involved and in love for several years, although we’re both very independent slow-moving types with relationships so it only became properly “serious” about two years ago. Hence the reason I know him very well, but this situation is new. It’s our second Christmas together in our own household as a couple like this, and last years holiday was a bit lost to unrelated life chaos. So our first proper Christmas together. Overall very lovely, cosy, and happy! We had a nice season. But I want some outside opinions on a gift thing that is still lingering in my head.
My man is great, loving and caring. However, it’s well-established that he’s just not very good at gifts. He doesn’t have much of a knack for choosing things, he doesn’t enjoy the process and experiences a lot of stress around it. I completely understand this about him. I personally do enjoy gifting, I find the opportunity to show love through selecting just the right gift to be fun, and a really thoughtfully-chosen item from someone fills me with a lot of joy and appreciation. It means a lot for me when he makes the effort.
Of course around Christmas, this becomes a huge deal! He gets overwhelmed with the gifting stress, as do many. I’ve learned to help him by giving him a pretty specific list of things he could give me that I would like from him; a camelback water pack for hiking, a particular board game that I liked and wanted to own, a larger coffee urn so we could make enough for two easily, lingerie that he would like to see me in, etc. I was excited to see what thing he would go for. We have a pretty tight budget, so the expectation was to exchange only one or two items each.
What he also has in his life is a very large extended family and godparent network of older folks he has known his whole life. It’s a pretty incredible caring community of people his parents have known for decades, and he grew up with a lot of doting aunties and godmothers. I have met them all many times and they’re very warm and friendly people, and I like them very much, but I wouldn’t say I have close personal relationships with any of them. Early in the season, his mother sent us a note asking if we had any Christmas gift wishes, since people want to send presents. I named a few types of things that people I am only acquainted with might give - I like candles, fancy soaps or lotions, perhaps some nice chocolate. He also texted back although I didn’t see it.
So comes Christmas morning. We have our gifts to exchange, and we have been sent some things from his family and friends and mine. I open something from his mom to me - a camelback water pack? He must have mentioned it to her, I guess, how thoughtful of her to remember. I open a gift from his godmother - that board game I wanted? Huh… A gift from another aunt - a large coffee urn for the house! And from another aunt - whew! Just some nice gloves. I was almost worried to see lingerie!
And from him? Some small candles. Which I did say I liked, generally. But it wasn’t something I wanted from him, I had suggested more specific things.
He had apparently sent my wishlist (minus the lingerie, I imagine!) to his mom, and I guess it got passed to the rest of these folks!
This feels kind of uncomfortable. I want to bring it up, because I’m bothered by it, but don’t want to sound ungrateful. I’m sure he feels like it was a great solution somehow - now I got my whole list of wants! But I just feel like what I wanted was a little bit of effort outside of his comfort zone for me, and all he actually did was like, outsource it to people who don’t actually know me that well. I hope it didn’t make me come across weirdly to them! Someone they hardly know making these very specific requests? I dunno.
Does anyone else do this with gifts? Any suggestions on a good way to bring it up? We normally have pretty good discussions around most things, but he’s so sensitive and self-conscious around this topic of gifts, so I’m a bit stumped here and would love input.
Tl;Dr - my partner sent my Christmas wishlist to him out to his relatives to give me, and didn’t actually gift me anything from it himself. How do I say that this feels weird?
Submitted January 10, 2023 at 04:05PM by WankSpanksoff https://ift.tt/F3akBUo
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