Tango, June 30th, 2007
The simple gold bracelet bestowed to mark Valentine’s Day. The new refrigerator for a birthday. The dinner check picked up by a date. While the purpose of gift giving may seem obvious, and our intentions straightforward, I’ve been preoccupied recently by what’s under the surface: a web of mixed emotions.
Gifts can symbolize a feeling or express a value. They can act, in the words of one researcher on the subject, University of Utah business professor Russell Belk, “as a powerful statement of the giver’s perception of the recipient.” They can quell worries and fill needs, or sometimes deliberately not fill them, since some givers insist on practical gifts, which are often interpreted as unromantic. They can affirm relationships or even improve them. But they can have plenty of negative consequences, as well.
In one study of more than 100 gift recipients, only 42 percent reported “positive emotional experiences,” while 58 percent reported the opposite. Plenty of gifts simply con?rm an already detectable distance. Givers reveal their ignorance and thoughtlessness all the time; every item of clothing you never even hung up is proof of that. And how many times has a present you didn’t anticipate left you feeling burdened?
Meanwhile, individuals add their own weirdnesses to the sauce. Some fixate on the surprise. Like my brother, who says of his partner of 22 years, “She always asks me what I want, which makes me crazy. If I tell her, I might as well go buy it myself!” Some fixate on protecting themselves from disappointment. Ellen M., for instance, who has spent too many Valentine’s Days alone for her taste, told her current boyfriend early on that she needs a gift come February 14. “I’ve had to remind him a couple of times,” she says, matter-of-factly. “He says, ‘Oh, yeah, I have to write that down.’” Getting him to express his devotion wasn’t the point. She just needed to make sure this holiday would be different.
On such a tangled, fragile mesh of meanings there rests enormous weight. This year Americans will spend more than $200 billion on gifts, almost one out of every ten retail dollars. According to Visa, the average American spends $941 during the holiday season alone, and marketers push us to purchase for some 12 different occasions, from Mother’s Day to Halloween.
Not surprisingly, then, money is at the heart of much gift giving. So much so that social scientists frequently use economics as a model to explain the ritual. To give a present, they say, is to pay something, however abstractly, and to expect some return on your investment. The most blatant example of this model has become a cliché: Guy takes girl to dinner; girl has sex with guy. Dinner is a gift with an unspecified but recognized price tag. A male in one study, in fact, referred to gifts as “fiscal foreplay.”
All sorts of people calibrate their spending based on this notion of exchange, often attempting to match an estimate of what the recipient gave them last time around. They do this for all sorts of reasons. “He likes to pay for dinner,” says Ellen M., of her new guy. “But I never want anyone to think I’m in it for that, so I pick up the check at least half the time. I feel a strong need to assert my independence.” A caring, if frugal, gift-giver, Clark C. has found himself “making sure I had gifts for people who I felt would abuse me [if I didn’t]. Certain people, pay-to-play people, will let you know they expect something.”
Although the idea of the “unconscious marketplace” is convincing, it’s only one way to understand gift offerings. In a 13-year project with colleagues Cele Otnes and Young Chan Kim, University of Texas-San Antonio marketing professor Tina Lowrey studied 14 women in the weeks surrounding Christmas. Every two or three years, they met with their mostly middle-class, Midwestern subjects to gather data about their gift-buying habits. They conducted 30- to 90-minute interviews and accompanied the women on hour-long shopping trips. “We found that the women took on different roles in different situations,” says Lowrey. “They could play multiple roles with the same person over a year.” They could even play different roles with the same person on the same occasion. One woman makes a practice every year of giving her younger sister two presents, one a “fun” item and the other a book. The gifts reveal two different roles the older sibling is playing: entertainer and teacher. Similarly, as Lowrey points out, “A lot of couples give one mushy card and one funny card, which tends to happen most on birthdays.”
Lowrey and her team have identified six roles that gift-givers play. Teacher, or what they call “socializer,” is a common one. So is the “pleaser,” whose intention is very simply to give pleasure. The “provider” is nurturing or protective, which makes socks, gloves, and underwear her/his preferred standbys. There’s also the “avoider,” who tries to duck the occasion altogether; the “acknowledger,” who gives out of obligation; and the “compensator,” who attempts to make up for a hurt or a loss.
My brother, for one, is a die-hard pleaser. “He’s really good at gifts and he spends a lot of time thinking about it,” his wife, Jane O., reports. After the inlaid jewelry box and the vases for her antique pottery collection, he made her a birdhouse for nesting wild owls. “It wasn’t just the gift; it was partly that he made it, and then we went out to put it up, and he climbed up a ladder in the snow.”
Paul F. is a pleaser, too, though he often takes on a second role. A big manly guy who has been with his boyfriend, Grant M., for four years, Paul likes to make sure Grant is “provided for,” which explains his choice of the fancy little keychain with a pen light that helps Grant read better in dark restaurants.
Most interesting about Lowrey’s research is what she found out by going back to her subjects over the course of more than a decade. “The steady couples started out giving more selfishly,” Lowrey explains, “[the women] giving what they wanted their husbands to have. ‘He doesn’t do well around the house; I’ll give him a level.’” These women were acting as socializers. With time, they moved into the role of pleaser. Although they spent smaller amounts, their gifts became less about themselves and more about their loved ones.
As one might have guessed, the selfish giving tended to be far more extravagant. “The younger, single, childless women were spending tons of money on their significant others,” Lowrey comments. “One woman tried to set up a home office for her boyfriend and broke up with him the next year.
“They were trying to impress their hopefuls,” Lowrey suspects. “The more relaxed you are in a relationship, the less the gift is necessary as a symbol.” My brother, of owl-house fame, bears this out: “We used to spend more—a few hundred bucks. But we’re to the point where it doesn’t have to cost a lot.” Plus, he explains, “I’ve kind of fed all her interests.” Luckily, Jane is on the same page. “You learn over the years: Why get stressed out?,” she says.
Russell Belk, whose research has taken him inside cultures around the world, says gifts that aspire to signify romantic love share some common qualities. They tend to be spontaneously acquired. They are chosen without regard for price; intended for a unique individual who is valued as a whole; suggestive of sacri?ce; and expressive, emotional, and deeply pleasing. There is no reciprocity implied in such a token. There is no sign of obligation or habit or personal gain.
One of Grant M.’s gifts to Paul F. gets pretty close to that ideal. Almost a year into their relationship, Paul had already intoned the scary words, “I love you.” Grant had waited. Then, on their first February 14 together, he announced to Paul, “I want to give you your Valentine gift.” After a pause, he said, “I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” Paul accepted.
Martha Baer is a writer and editor based in San Francisco. She is a coauthor of Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World.
