Have you heard of Gary Chapman’s Love Languages?

In this schema, each of us have different channels through which we most readily give and receive love. The Happier Podcast recently did an episode on it if you want to learning more. If you want to find out your love language, take the quiz here.

I’ve had a lot of thoughts on gift giving rolling around in my brain for years, yet learning about the love languages helped me clarify some of them.
My primary love language is acts of service, like how my husband vacuumed my car last week *heart eyes.* The best acts of service are things I don’t have to be in charge of. For instance, my husband says he’ll cook for me, but when I have to ask him to cook, and then tell him what to make, I feel anxiety and shame rather than loved. But, if he just cooks something for me, I eat it and feel nourished.

For years I’ve asked people to not buy gifts for me. Many might think I hate gifts or hate holidays or am just a joy kill. But my reasons for asking people to not buy gifts for me are more complicated than that, and related to my core story.

First, I hate for stuff to be not used. The stuff in our homes should be meaningful, useful, or beautiful. I don’t like waste or random stuff that doesn’t fit into that category. And I really dislike things that might be useful to someone, but are not useful to me, piling up. Those of you who follow me on social media have witnessed this, as every time I clean out a closet I want stuff to go to a good home rather than just the trash or a thrift store. Ultimately, I believe we show major disrespect for the planet and the future if we don’t value the things we have. So, that’s the first part of my no gifts puzzle.

The second part is that, for years, even when I was explicit about what I liked or wanted, I got other stuff instead–sometimes gobs of other stuff, or other stuff similar to what I wanted but not quite. At a core level, the story I was telling about these gifts was that the people who gave them: did not get me, did not understand me, and didn’t think it was worth figuring me out.

I get I’m a bit of an enigma, but am I really that bad?

What I’ve realized recently is that my secondary love language is receiving gifts even in all of these years of no gifts. Huh. The trouble is, random things, or things that don’t fit into the meaningful/useful/beautify metric, make me feel misunderstood and unloved, so it’s a double-edged sword. The results here are that I’m a complete asshole and only feel loved when people get the gift magically right, which is nearly impossible. Thus, no gift is better than some gift in this labyrinth.

Gifts in recent memory that really meant something to me: two years ago the only gift I got on Christmas was an Amazon gift card from my in-laws. I got to buy books of my own choosing with it and I didn’t feel compelled to buy household shit. The second gift was when my husband taped a Dutch Bros Coffee gift card to my steering wheel at the start of the new semester. I felt seen and understood in both of those moments.