This is an excerpt from the Dear Prudence podcast. For this episode, Dr. Orna Guralnik, host of Showtime’s Couples Therapy, joined Jenée Desmond-Harris to answer your questions. You can listen to the rest of the episode here.
Q. No Birthday Gift Blues: I met my now-husband when we worked together five years ago. We dated on and off and never really seriously. I wanted to commit, he wasn’t ready until he moved away for work. Once I was gone, we still were in contact and he decided that he wanted to commit to me. We were doing a long distance thing for a while and decided to discuss our future when I came back for a wedding. The timing worked out that I would also be there for my birthday. I had planned a group event to see a lot of friends, but the actual date of my birthday was a weekday, and I had plans to just hang out with my then-boyfriend, now-husband. He didn’t have anything planned or do anything for my birthday. Not a card, not flowers, not a gift, not an activity, nothing. He said, “Happy birthday,” and expected me to hang out with him at his house.
I was really upset. I stayed for a bit and then left. We didn’t speak for several days and I considered ending it. He called and asked to take me out after a couple of days. We went out and I explained that birthdays are really important to me. They’re the one day a year that is about a person and not shared as a social holiday, and that I need him to do something for it in the future. We discussed the future, and he quit his job and moved in with me away from his friends and family. I think for him this was a gift in his mind. He was committing to me and making a monumental change in his life for me. We lived together for about eight months. When he proposed, we started planning a large wedding, but ended up having a small family wedding a few months later instead.
We’ve now been married for three months, and my birthday came around again. He asked if I would mind if he cooked supper for my birthday in advance, and I said, “That’d be great.” On the day of my birthday, I got a happy birthday text message; he was at work. He didn’t say happy birthday to me before he left, and he came home with flowers, but nothing else.
My birthday gift was him cooking me supper. He does this a couple nights a week already. I cook most of the time or we get takeout. When I asked him why he didn’t get me a gift or anything, he said I am “too hard to shop for. I already buy everything I want anyway.” This is not true.
I had been dropping hints for a month before my birthday of stuff I’d like, including him planning a day trip for us of hiking and breakfast or a short getaway or items or detailing my car. I’ve tried to discuss it, but he won’t engage. He just shuts down and hopes it goes away and I won’t to discuss it. I want to know why he didn’t do anything for my birthday. It bothers me that we had a monumental conversation the year before and he seemed to completely forget or ignore my wishes and feelings. Part of my anger is that for three years, I had been making sure I marked his birthday. I always get him a gift and throw him a party or a getaway. I know that his family does gifts because he had asked my help pre-ordering his mother a gift for her birthday, and he was upset it wouldn’t arrive on the day of her birthday. He also made sure to buy his dad a gift before he left town so that it would be there.
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Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice podcast, where Prudie responds to your questions about relationships at home, work, and beyond. Join Jenée Desmond Harris and a guest each week as they offer helpful answers to your problems. Listen every Friday on Slate or your podcast player of choice.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Orna, this is actually a huge theme in the letters I receive, and I can feel it coming as the holidays approach. I know I’ll get more on this topic. I also see it in my various Facebook groups and mom’s groups. There’s this pattern of women—this letter writer doesn’t give pronouns, but I’m going to go out and limb and assume it’s a woman—women not receiving gifts from their husbands and feeling really hurt by it and mentioning it and still being disappointed. The most popular solutions I see are, “You have to tell them it’s important to you,” but often that still doesn’t work, and the next solution ends up being, “You know what? Just take the credit card and buy your own gift, stuff your own stocking.” Can you help me understand what it is with this particular source of disappointment in relationships, and is there a more useful framework for thinking about what’s happening when a woman is constantly disappointed in this area?
Dr. Orna Guralnik: Yeah, tricky. When I’m listening to this, I’m thinking about a few things.
First of all, Jenée, the issue of being disappointed is a major issue. The experience of disappointment is a very rich and fertile ground to explore when you’re thinking analytically about what triggers things between two people in a couple. I’m going to go back to the experience of disappointment, but disappointment about not getting gifts in my mind is similar or parallel to disappointment of, “Oh, I ask him, ‘Just don’t leave your coffee cup in the sink. Why don’t you just rinse your cup? I’ve asked it a million times.’” Or, “Pick up your socks, I’ve asked it a million times.”
In a way, it kind of captures what I think is most difficult and most profound about being in a relationship, which is that your partner’s going to be different from you, and that is the difficulty and that is the big challenge for growth. We can talk specifically about gifts, but I want to put it in the context of people having different ways of doing things, whether it’s celebrating birthdays or showing love or taking care of the house. There’s this famous book of 30 years ago, Love Languages. People need and demonstrate love and care differently, and to some extent, it’s sort of each person comes with their own DNA of what matters to them and how they want to show it. Then starts a negotiation, a subtle negotiation about which language are we using in this relationship. That’s kind of the more general context I would like to put this into, and then we can talk more specifically about disappointment and about this particular predicament of this couple, birthday presents, and how to understand it.
Jenée: What you said reminded me that I’ve heard you say before that the journey in a relationship is to negotiate otherness. How do you deal with the fact that your partner is different from you? You’ve said in a relationship, you’re creating your own mini-political system. So, what kind of system do you believe in and what are your ethics about difference? Is, “I like birthday gifts and he’s not into giving birthday gifts,” just one of those many differences that can exist in a relationship?
Orna: Yes, but I would say that there’s something probably a lot more interesting happening here than simply receiving gifts or not receiving gifts on a birthday. I would start with the letter writer’s leaning into disappointment in a very kind of dogged way, because even in this short letter that she sent you, she’s describing all sorts of ways in which this partner has been very loving, giving, moving for her. Remembering that the birthday matters to her, so offering to cook supper, finding his way of moving into her world. And rather than see that as his way of giving, and giving a lot, in terms of holding her in mind, this writer is really leaning into disappointment. And when people are invested in disappointment, if that’s kind of a major place for them, to be disappointed, that’s a place that they need to do a lot of work internally to understand what this is about for them.
Why is that the focus for them, the disappointment versus what is there? It’s kind of the glass half empty preoccupation. Is that about some kind of early deprivation for her that she’s working through in this example and kind of missing the bigger picture? I started off by talking about the bigger picture. Is she missing out something bigger that’s happening between them and feeling like she needs to drop into some kind of sinkhole of disappointment and what is that about for her? There were little clues in the way she was phrasing things that made me think, “Okay, there’s a more complicated negotiation going on there,” because he may not know what’s going on with him like, “Why is the birthday gift something that’s hard for him to do?” But it’s obviously hard for him to do. There’s some reason why he’s not leaning in that direction. He says that he said something like that, “She’s hard to please, or, “Hard to buy for…”
Jenée: Yeah, “Too hard to shop for, I already buy everything I want anyway.”
Orna: So, he’s telling her a clue. He’s giving her a clue that there’s a way in which he knows he’s going to disappoint her. He’s saying, “Okay, there’s a well of disappointment over there. I’m afraid to go there.” There’s some way that he feels ill-equipped. The more she leans into disappointment, the more he’s going to feel ill-equipped to satisfy that, which is not a place where you want to gift from. It’s a place where you want to hide from.
Jenée: Right, that’s so interesting. I was going to point out to you that, well, he manages to get gifts for other people in his family. He got gifts for his mom. He knows what a gift is. He’s not opposed to shopping.
Orna: Although didn’t she say that he asked for help?
Jenée: Yeah, right. He did ask for help. That’s true.
Orna: There’s some way that pleasing someone else is anxiety provoking for him, and the more anxious you feel about it, the less generous you’re going to feel.
Jenée: That makes so much sense.
Orna: It’s a dynamic.
Jenée: Right. What should the letter writer actually do?
Orna: I think ideally, she’d want to actually remind herself of ways in which he is giving and thank him for that and talk about that. Lean into the ways, “Oh my God, you moved for me. You remembered it’s my birthday. You’re actually going to make me supper. That’s so sweet.” What’s the thing about the gift itself? There’s probably so many other ways in which he’s showing up from this letter, it sounds like.
Jenée: Right.
Orna: Focus on that. Figure out with herself, what is it about the thing itself, the gift itself that really matters to her? What happened to her when she was a kid around birthdays? What did it mean to her? People have a lot of projections about birthdays and what it means to them. I would be interested just not as a dynamic between them, but as something for her to figure out, what does it mean to her?
You can listen to the rest of this week’s Dear Prudence episode here.
