‘Tis the season of giving! Also, the season of receiving. Ideally (and often!) this is a joyous event; sometimes it’s a confusing or neutral one; at worst, it’s harrowing. We’ve run the full gamut of these experiences, as you can see here! Woof. Don’t leave us up here all alone; share your stories from the trenches with us in the comments!
I have this thing an ex gave me that I have not been able to figure out how to get rid of for years. I’ve moved it twice because it’s not something that can just be taken to goodwill, or even thrown in the trash, because it depicts us. I think maybe it needs to be burned? But I can’t quite bring myself to do that, because someone (not my ex) put a lot of work into it. So now it just takes up space in my closet and I don’t know what to do about it.
“Later during a screaming break-up fight, she took back If Not, Winter, because I no longer deserved Sappho.”
wow!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nicole!! The amount of effort they put into that truly terrible gift! How did they even get to decide on a gift that bad? Did they do bad gifting exercises? This is a whole other level.
Ugh I hate posting comments on my phone.
This comment thing happens to me, too. BUT OMG YOU ARE RIGHT. Like…this took saying “yes this is a good idea” over a sustained period of time, so many opportunities to turn back, never taken.
it was A Move and honestly, I respect it
Lol at “he kept the record player in the divorce,” it’s like a reverse gift of the magi
he still has my mitski vinyl too 😔
I had a well-off lawyer ex who said she wanted to give me one season of Xena DVDs but at $20 it was “too expensive”, so she would buy me a coffee instead. We’d been together nearly a year at that point. I told this to one of my friends, and she gathered three other friends together to buy me the entire box set of 6 seasons of Xena DVDs. I about cried at my friends’ kindness, and that relationship definitely ended the following year.
“It wasn’t a grand gesture or anything over-committal, just a little slice of being seen.”
this is my favorite! i love gifts that feel so personal. for yule my roommate got me a book about female aviators because i’m a nerd about that and they mentioned ‘i didn’t see this one on your goodreads so i figured you hadn’t read it yet’ and reader, going through my goodreads is a TASK. i feel love in this chili’s tonight
Best: A bottle of a discontinued perfume I’d worn and loved many years ago that I’d mentioned once off handedly and she’d somehow managed to track down despite me trying and failing many times.
My worst ex was a Taurus, and she definitely gave the best and the worst gifts, and most of them were apologies. After we broke up, I went through all her cards and letters and they all literally started with “I’m sorry that…”, gosh.
The best gift she gave me was a jar of love notes. We were living overseas for 6 months, and toward the end I was super homesick. She filled a jar with enough notes to see me home, and I was allowed to pick one every day. They said things like “you’re pretty” and “I like your butt”.
The best/worst I ever gave an ex was a sword. We were 16, she wasn’t a collector or anything, I just saw the sword, put it on layaway, spent months paying it off then had it ENGRAVED with the word ‘eternity’. Gosh, what am I like.
Put it on layaway! I love this. Absolutely nothing wrong with being a melodramatic sword-gifter. Nothing at all.
I cannot get over him giving you that record and then keeping the record player in the divorce!! Goodness !
“Like when she would say or do something hurtful, instead of apologizing and taking accountability she would buy me something.”
My dad was and is this way.
And unfortunately my ex also gave me gifts instead of doing the things they had promised to do months before!
Nicole, oh my god??? The post-let’s-divorce *belated* Valentine’s photo album of food you made?? Wow. People do weird shit.
Right?? Like, there’s the kind of person who takes you for granted and never thanks you for cooking them meals, and then there’s the kind of person who takes grainy photos of all the meals you’ve ever cooked(?) and gives them to you for Valentine’s Day(!). How about just.. finding the middle ground between those two extremes.
Agreed. Or maybe we could exist off this spectrum almost entirely!
It was so weird!
Whatever else I may say about my ex, it’s indisputably true that she was very good at gifts. She gave me all kinds of fun expensive outdoor gear that I probably would never have bought for myself, but still use years later. She pulled some strings one year to rent out a remote cabin for my birthday that wasn’t supposed to be available to the public. She always put a lot of thought and care into gifts. The downside was that I felt extremely inadequate by comparison – I think I’m usually a fairly thoughtful gifter myself, but I always felt like I was not meeting her high gift-giving expectations.
After finally falling out for good with my ex-turned-roommate, they mailed me some kinda weird socks cause I’d always complained about them stealing my socks, both when we were a couple and later when we were housemates with other people (notably they didn’t wear and then lose any of our other housemates’ socks). I definitely wore the socks but I also thought it was a shitty parting gift.
RACHEL.
One best gift was a surprise trip to see Rocky Horror on Broadway (a million years ago; we were in high school and her dad drove us). And later, my now-ex-ish wife (Taurus moon) was amazing at gifts – the “slice of being seen” kind. Those included a set of French onion crocks and the best spoons ever – perfect heft and balance – the full 10 bottles of hot sauce from the most recent season of Hot Ones, a bottle of sloe gin and some coquito. Clearly, the way to my heart is through my stomach.
The worst was trying to fix my car cd, and then buying a new one that they tried unsuccessfully to install. Nine months later I finally spent several hours and a fair amount of money to have someone install it. It still only sort of works. I wish they had just left the old one.
The best random gift of time was from my parents. I was wedged in a car line to pick up medicine that one of my kids needed before bed. My parents stopped by and traded places so I could take my kids home in their car to get ready for bed while my parents sat in my car and picked up the medicine and brought it over. It totally warmed my heart.
Worst gift ever from an ex was when she gave me the EXACT SAME pair of flannel pyjamas as her mother. Like, we opened them at the same time and everything thing. It was awkward.
When a subsequent ex saw them later on and found out their origin story, they went strait to the donation pile.
The best gift my ex-husband, who was my brand-new-boyfriend at the time, ever gave me was coming out to me as bi. (He looked very nervous. I gasped in relieved delight and said “Oh wow me too!” First time I ever came out to anyone.) I honestly don’t know how many more years it would have been, if ever, before I came out to anyone otherwise. The second-best gifts he gave me were getting me hooked on Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.
The worst gift he gave me was most of our marriage … but even that has some silver linings because boy howdy did I ever learn some lessons. My second marriage has been fifteen years (so far) of delight and I guess valuable lessons learned from the ex can have at least a little credit for that. But only a little. ;)