“He Literally Screamed”: Woman Asks The Internet If She Was In The Wrong For Getting A Male Friend An Expensive Gift

Gift giving can be great fun, heartwarming and sentimental, but, on the flip side, there are all sorts of hidden pitfalls, from costs, to how personal to make things and sometimes figuring out just what the hell to get someone.

Unfortunately, most gifts don’t just stay between the giver and the receiver, as one woman found out. She turned to the internet for advice, after a particularly expensive watch she got her friend managed to anger his GF. She felt like it overshadowed her gifts and seemed to take personal issue with OP in general.

Image source: Pristine_Balance_365

Despite being generally a good-natured thing, gift-giving and the etiquette around it often can cause a great deal of stress. Proximity to the receiver, social positions, economics, cultural and religious aspects, every human demographic category seems to have its own way of complicating gift-giving. Particularly manipulative people can use gifts as well, either to endear themselves to someone or to use it in creating guilt down the line. It’s also possible to fully unintentionally create distress when giving gifts, such as in OP’s story. Because there are social pressures around gifts, people will often disregard practicality and even the receiver's wishes in order to not appear cheap or uncaring. For example, these days, many people prefer digital media, but a digital “gift” still has some stigma around it, so people will still prefer giving it, while simultaneously preferring to receive physical media.

The “difficulties” in giving a gift are so commonplace, that we even build games around it. White Elephant is an office classic for a reason. Originating as a custom in Southeast Asia, where a white elephant would be seen as a ritually important animal, it was a “gift” for people the ruler disliked. Maintaining an elephant is, as one can imagine, quite expensive, but it was not socially acceptable to dispose of or kill it, “trapping” the receiver. Ironically, as protected animals, this strategy might still work in the present day if one could just go around buying elephants. Normally, people now will play a variant where smaller, more comical items are given, although a large, expensive, or unwieldy item can make for a pretty funny prank gift.

Someone deathly afraid of causing offense or embarrassment might turn to the internet for advice and to make sure they are not committing any faux pas. This endeavor might quickly turn into stress when one finds that nearly every event, holiday, and occasion can technically be a reason for a gift, but not every occasion is made equal, so one must be ready to assess and adjust the value of the gift based on a variety of factors. This is likely why housewarmings and weddings have set gift lists, as otherwise, the entire endeavor becomes a mess. Plus, one can easily imagine a scenario where, without a gift list, one gets gifted a multitude of microwaves. Then this becomes a sort of unintentional white elephant, where one has to return them or sell them off, all while hiding the fact that some people’s gifts are being discarded.

Regardless, giving gifts is normal and also necessary in certain cultural contexts. In many places, showing up at someone's house empty-handed is taboo. In the US, Christmas is the premier gift-giving holiday. It seems that the pressure to give gifts vastly exceeds the need to receive and use them. In the United States, over a billion dollars worth of gift cards expire every year, while in 2017, around 3.5 billion dollars worth of gifts were reported as “unwanted” by the receiving party. So OP should consider herself lucky that her significant expense was greatly appreciated by the receiver.