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Dear Abby: Gift-giving reciprocity
DEAR ABBY: My husband and I have two kids under the age of 2. Our close friends "John and Jane" also have two kids under 2.
We recently invited them to our oldest daughter's birthday party. When they arrived, Jane informed me they hadn't had time to shop for a gift and that they "owed us one." I brushed it off and said I was just happy they came.
Well, now it's their older daughter's birthday. We are invited and I'm confused. Do we still buy her a gift? We want to go, but we feel ripped off because our daughter received nothing. Would it be rude to attend the party without buying their daughter a gift? -- RIPPED OFF IN SAN DIEGO
DEAR RIPPED OFF: Yes, it would. You say these are close friends. John and Jane may not have followed up with a gift for your daughter because you told them you were "just happy they came," so don't hold it against them. If this happened repeatedly, my advice might be different, but this may simply have been an oversight.
We recently invited them to our oldest daughter's birthday party. When they arrived, Jane informed me they hadn't had time to shop for a gift and that they "owed us one." I brushed it off and said I was just happy they came.
Well, now it's their older daughter's birthday. We are invited and I'm confused. Do we still buy her a gift? We want to go, but we feel ripped off because our daughter received nothing. Would it be rude to attend the party without buying their daughter a gift? -- RIPPED OFF IN SAN DIEGO
DEAR RIPPED OFF: Yes, it would. You say these are close friends. John and Jane may not have followed up with a gift for your daughter because you told them you were "just happy they came," so don't hold it against them. If this happened repeatedly, my advice might be different, but this may simply have been an oversight.
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1. Laugh. A lot.
2. Show the LW my 9-year-old's play room and tell her how grateful she will be in a few years that she does not have yet another set of plastic pieces of which you will lose just enough to make reselling/donating the gift impossible and which your child will decide every time you try to cull it that it is her favorite toy EVER and cannot possibly be gotten rid of.
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"may have simply been an oversight" is the weirdest part of Abby's response. Like, they might have forgotten, but there's a greater chance that they're trying to... what, scam gifts from you without giving you gifts? deliberately snub you?
I'm not a parent, but I'm imagining that if I had two kids under two I would probably be lucky if I remembered to put on pants before leaving for the party, let alone bring a present.
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Um. I definitely come out of a family culture where there were Rules About Obligatory And Reciprocal Gift-Giving Among Social Acquaintances. That was What You Did. I have assorted opinions and theories about how this worked and the reasons for it. I am not sure that they contribute anything to this discussion, but if anyone's curious at this late date, I'll gleefully run my mouth/finger-on-the-keyboard.
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'Ware the blue Bambi stampede!
Let's see if I can frame my thoughts at this point, because I had a lot of visceral, "Yes, this is an important question that LW is asking!" reactions to this.
And I think it goes to--- actually, it was one of the themes in the metafilter thread for "Where's My Cut: On Unpaid Emotional Labor", because there was a whole line of discussion on there about the value of various forms of gift-giving (and thanking for gift-giving) in terms of emotional labor.
That it's not about the item as a material good, it's about taking the time and effort to think of this other person--- it's a way of saying "you matter to me, you are important enough that I will think about you and your feelings and that I actively want to commemorate and acknowledge that you had a milestone in your life" (whether it's a celebratory gift or a sympathetic one). And that it works in the way that "just" attending the party that someone throws or "just" visiting them doesn't, because the host is doing emotional labor (and usually material and financial labor as well to do hosting duties, like making sure that the house is clean and that food is available, and decorating if applicable), and presumably both parties are enjoying the fact of the other's company, so that's an equal exchange, but then the host has done all this other "stuff" to make the time and space for the enjoying-of-each-other's-company to happen--- and also it shows that you're thinking about the person when they're not right there in front of you at the party or other social occasion, that you put thought into this person's existence in a more than, "Oh, they're here, I'll talk to them!" or "Oh, free food and people I like to talk to, yeah, I'll do that," kind of way. It's a way of saying, "I thought about you even though you weren't right in front of me."
Well. And then there's a whole lot of stuff that's specific to my family--- for example, according to my mother, my great-grandmother used the phrase "their hands dangling at their sides" as a way of saying that the person in question did not have the ~courtesy~ to bring a gift to their host when visiting, and this was considered rude. And... frankly, as an adult, I am not sure of the specifics of the rules, but I know that there were specific times when you got specific people gifts of a specific value. Christmas and birthdays were the big ones, but if you went to someone's house you brought a gift, too.
Which I think goes back to that emotional labor piece--- it's a way of saying, "No, you are not just a source for free food and drink or even the enjoyment of your company (in a setting where you have been the one to go to the effort to make the pleasure-of-each-other's-society happen), you are a person I care about." And on the one hand there was definitely some classist stuff all up in that, and the intersection of, specifically, my great-grandmother's social rules with the fact that we're a family of introverts for whom hosting and socializing and people-reading and small talk are hard (seriously, the number of "maiden aunties" and "bachelor uncles" in, like, the last four generations of the family is pretty telling!) meant that gifting and the more codified, material and tangible social acts were actually easier or more comprehensible forms of social/emotional labor.
And... here's that "Obligatory Socializing While Introverted" piece--- again, at least in my family, I think a lot of it was about the social obligations being obligations; they were not heartfelt, but they were something that you did because That's What's Done. Not necessarily because you liked spending time with those people, and I think the gifting was kind of a wordless acknowledgement of that. Kind of like the line in the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol, where the one guy says that he'll go to Scrooge's funeral, "if lunch is provided--- but I insist on being fed, for the time I'll waste". That kind of, "I don't really like spending time with these people, but I get something material out of it."
And--- this is the thing I'm really struggling about how to unpack meaningfully for this post--- but... as an adult, most of my relationships actually don't follow that model! And it's because most of my relationships are ones where the people actually like each other's company for its own sake! What a novel idea! And gifting tends to be spontaneous and does not usually follow culturally-conventional schedules or milestones. Gifts are something you give because you think the other person would like to have the thing and being the one to provide it makes you happy in itself. But on the flip side, I also don't have any social/professional "ambitions" to further with that kind of "socialize with people you don't like for other purposes".
And... on the other hand, there is this thing around reciprocity in socially-obligated gift-giving that is designed to avoid mooching. Because I have seen a couple of instances of people trying to leverage my mom's sense of obligation around gift-giving to people with whom she is in certain kinds of relationships (and one of them, being a member of her own family, almost certainly knew those rules, and, based not just on this but literally everything else about this person's behavior for all of my life, was trying to game the family's gift-giving rules)... except that once the obligatory-reciprocity "clause" kicked in, boy howdy did my mom shut down the free lunch. And is far more ill-disposed to these people than if they'd "neglected" any gifting "obligations" in the relationship but hadn't gone a grabby-handsing at her.
So, especially with the last paragraph, my takeaway has been that if you are going to have a cultural rule that says that gifts are exchanged at certain times between certain people, one of the corollaries almost has to be that you pay attention to whether everyone participates and specifically keep an eye out for chronic non-givers who are still happy to receive. Because otherwise someone will game it--- and because the gifting is obligatory and not spontaneous and for the mutual joy of it, it's grating to have someone drop their end of the emotional-labor travois, because the gifting is work. (Seriously, if LW had anyone do a thing like the people in my last paragraph did, you can get into once-burned-twice-careful territory, especially if you're not good at reading people.)
Which is... very different from how I think about the gift-giving in my own chosen-as-an-adult relationships, because they are seldom structured around obligatory exchanges. They happen because we want this person to have this thing. Which also seems to be what most of the people in this thread are describing.
(And then there's my dad's side of my family, which uses Arbitrarily Didactic Gift-Giving: my paternal grandfather, for years, insisted on sending us a particular brand of $food, when everyone in my immediate family preferred a different brand, because Paternal Grandfather insisted that of course we actually liked his brand better than the one that we actually liked. That one? That one is just funny.)
Re: 'Ware the blue Bambi stampede!
Re: 'Ware the blue Bambi stampede!
Re: 'Ware the blue Bambi stampede!
I do not have much to add -- except that there is also, I think, the thing of people who Always Have A Gift To Bring With? My partner is of the school of interaction where there just... exists a drawer full of small things it might be appropriate to give people you're visiting. I am baffled by this, but hey, it seems to work for him? (But... it's also part of the culture of giving STUFF when you visit, STUFF that people might not necessarily want but that Accumulates, and that is VERY MUCH a problem in his family.)
Re: 'Ware the blue Bambi stampede!
And, yes--- the Drawer o' Stuff can be a thing! And the whole Accumulation of Unneeded But Requisite Gift Items... let's just say that I think Tolkien was onto something with the idea of the mathom in hobbit culture--- those Gifts-for-Obligatory-Gifting-Occasions that get passed around more or less openly. *snerk*. Though in my family's culture there is more of thing around picking gifts for people, and the time and effort you spend on it is proportional to your care for the person (as least as my mother iterates the custom)... versus, you know, going to one of the catalogues that's effectively the equivalent of the Drawer o' Gifts but for long-distance relatives, and ordering one of the same fruit/cheese basket for all the Obligatory-Gift-Recipient friends'n'relations (/Winnie-the-Pooh reference).