Is there any way to get the people you love to stop giving you things you despise, without being completely rude and insufferable about it?
Photo: Charles Gullung/Getty Images Gifts come to us like a surprise attack in the night: often completely secret until it’s too late and you’re staring at untold horrors hidden inside gift wrap. We know they’re coming, but we don’t know what they are, so there’s very little we can do to stop them.
Every year, there’s more: a crochet vest, fancy leather gloves, a stack of concept-heavy alt-politics mags. If I had to guess, 34 percent of gifts are deeply unappealing to the recipients. And though the gift was foisted upon us unwillingly, we’re the people in charge of figuring out how to off-load a trinket dish with a kicky slogan on it. My friend is famous in her family for hiding sweaters from her sister behind her cousin’s boogie board, rather than stuff them into her carry-on.
But if your 20th birthday has come and gone, I understand this is a sort of cursed option. In that case, there’s a slightly more constructive strategy available to us: nudging people toward what you want — and away from what you don’t. “I ban whole categories from people,” my former roommate Rosa tells me, “but then I give them new categories.” Rosa uses envy to guide her: Her dad has incredible kitchen implements, so she asks him for cookware — and has banned him from giving her nonfiction.
But even in its very neutrality, these questions seem loaded! Clarity is crucial, yes, but extremely direct questions sap all the magic out of gifts. And because gifts are a mode of affection, calling their very existence into question seems potentially wounding.
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