Christmas gifts

[Scott 2]

When gifts are a person's primary love language, opting out is painful to them. We declined to play twenty years ago, sooo the damage is long since done. With hindsight, the message was both unintentionally and unavoidably hurtful. Especially knowing my lack of tact at that young age.

Those who didn't share our values largely drifted out of life. I'm not upset by the result, but I didn't fully appreciate the choice being made. Twenty years wiser - the relationship withdrawal feels very obvious.

It goes the other way too though. The gift givers are loving on their terms instead of yours. That's just as hurtful, imo. Though much more socially acceptable.

[Frita]

From what I understand, Chapman’s Five Love Languages isn’t a validated construct: https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/study ... languages/ It does provide a framework to reflect upon and communicate needs, though there is also an expectation to get something from someone else to be okay.

If not exchanging gifts is grounds for downgrading a relationship, I would wonder about the emotional maturity of the individual(s) involved. Can people reflect/understand/discuss their expectations and intentions for said exchanges? Can they collaborate to reach a mutual understanding?

Buying seasons have combined and expanded. For example, our local Walmart had back-to-school/Halloween/Christmas items displayed in August(!). Cue Madonna’s Material Girl.

[Scott 2]

Collaborating on a mutual understanding is ideal. In our case, we unilaterally decided to opt out. Getting people to stop took years, including my wife directly handing gifts back, explaining that we keep a simple life and cannot use them. Neither one of us is inclined to shop for gifts.

I found Chapman's framework an effective heuristic. When I first learned it, I also had an especially poor theory of mind. So asking what the other person values, opposed to assuming it matches what I value, was certainly a differentiator. A couple's language rankings don't have to match, but I think it helps when they align. Someone depending on me for words of praise, is going to have a bad time.

I was a little surprised by the overflowing Christmas aisle at Walgreens. Not upset about early access to Lindt peppermint chocolates though.

[Frita]

@Scott 2 Do you think mutual understanding is necessary for collaboration or just ideal? This has me questioning that someone can not understand the other and still respect their uniqueness. While it is a possibility, there is also the scenario of not understanding, not caring to do so, and requiring the other person to be wrong to be right.

Our gift exchange process has been similar to yours. @TheAnimal’s path sounds familiar too.

I also wonder if the Five Love Language highlights relationship killers:
•Words of affirmation (excessive criticism, calling names)
•Quality time (isolation, ignoring the person)
•Physical tough (lack of intimacy to include emotional neglect/abuse)
•Acts of service (not following through on commitments, expecting spouse to parent them)
•Receiving gifts (failing to acknowledge milestones in any way)

[Scott 2]

@Scott 2 Do you think mutual understanding is necessary for collaboration or just ideal?
...
I also wonder if the Five Love Language highlights relationship killers:

The understanding isn't required, things are just messier without it. Especially when people are different. I'd guess most operate at a more base level.

For someone like me, who's in the minority emotionally, a strong framework is incredibly helpful. I draw upon stacks of rules, to implement the wiring I wasn't born with. I don't have the luxury of winging it.

My marriage builds upon Gottman's model, along with later introduction of the attachment theory school of thought. I don't have enough breath of experience to generalize the five love languages to a relationship killers pattern.

My gut says the criteria are highly individual, dependent upon the person's attachment style. Yelling is a non starter for me, but some people do it daily. I'd be perfectly content to not speak for days, to cool off. Someone with anxious attachment might see that as the most hurtful option.

Circling back - it's probably not about the gifts. Rather a renegotiating of family values. That's what makes it hard.

[ertyu]

The gift givers I know who actually have this as a "love language" have the following philosophy of gift giving: "I know you well, so when I saw x thing, I knew it would be something you'd be happy to receive. Buying it for you made me feel connected to you because the act of buying it was me expressing that we know each other well and are close (else I wouldn't know to get it for you), and also expressing that it would spark joy for me to see you get a thing that sparks joy for you."

I am thinking of 2 particular people here: when they talk about gift giving, it's all, "and when my sister and I did x thing she mentioned y thing so when i saw z thing i thought, yes!! that's exactly right, she would really love/enjoy that!!" People like this enjoy gifts because they enjoy thinking that someone else has bothered to get to know them and wants to see them happy. It's not the gift, it's that the right gift is an embodiment of many different layers of connectedness.

These people would also feel sad or alienated and disconnected if someone has given them the wrong gift, or an impersonal gift.

The tldr here is that (1) I understand why a gift-giver type would be sad that someone didn't get them gifts, and (2) people who are explicitly told to stop giving gifts see it as a personal rejection. In either case, though, (1) and (2) imply that one has projected one's own value system and way of thinking and relating on others, rather than understanding that others might think and relate differently.

[Henry]

"I know you well, so when I saw x thing, I knew it would be something you'd be happy to receive. "

I suspected FFJ was lying about not wanting that giving plate.

[7Wannabe5]

My experience of "gifted" gift-givers is also just as ertyu described. However, I have also observed that this "gifted" gift-giver type is not so likely to be a rigid or devoted traditionalist who insists on mutual exchange on particular day on the calendar. They would rather that you gave them a gift, "just because you thought of them" than marching along with the masses. If you grok that what "traditionalists" want is "tradition" then you can also make them happy by creating/maintaining a tradition in lieu of a gift, as in "Every Christmas Eve, a Special Elf named Scott shovels any snow from our driveway and hangs a stocking full of peppermints on our door."

It's also important to remember that very young humans will benefit from "tradition" for the same reason and around the same age that they most benefit from "structure." In fact, you will find that they will often create it out of anything you happen to do 3 or 4 years in a row. Think about how much slower time passed and the degree of growth and development you might experience in just a year around age 6, and you will grok some of the purpose served by maintaining anchoring traditions. Conversely, if you find that you have no need or even negative need for any anchoring traditions as an adult, this may be because you have over-structured your day to day life. Does celebrating a holiday make you feel a bit spinned out and anxious because you can't do your daily workout at 9am and eat exactly in accordance with your diet regimen or does it bring you back to center because last year on Thanksgiving you were in Istanbul on business and the year before that you woke up in a hotel room tangled up with a strange new lover?

Can you make gift-giving into an opportunity for creativity and skill-development, maybe integrating your recent discovery that your great-grandmother's grandfather was a chief of the Cayuga clan into a gift of the supplies necessary for your loved ones to join together to celebrate the Maple Festival? Or maybe you are learning to play the clarinet and you can perform a piece with other family members? You could even prepare emergency kits for family members as I did the first year I found myself reading too many books about the coming apocalypse. Any of the 5 Love Languages can fairly easily be transformed into another that is more in alignment with the druthers of another. A strict boundary on the matter of gifts is actually indicative of a highly materialistic focus on flows which is more appropriate in a context such as installing weatherstripping than within the inter-subjective realm of culture, celebration, conviviality, and close personal relationships. IOW, if there are any tasks left undone at all in your realm of infrastructure, such as improving your weatherstripping, that could save you a buck or two you could add to an hour of reflection and/or DIY/creativity to rustle up a gift for a loved one, then you have no excuses for your neglect of this task/challenge. If others are not as thoughtful in the gifts they offer you, then that is their bad. You can't successfully model a way forward by ignoring or deriding the inter-subjective "we."

[Frita]

t's probably not about the gifts. Rather a renegotiating of family values. That's what makes it hard.

(1) I understand why a gift-giver type would be sad that someone didn't get them gifts, and (2) people who are explicitly told to stop giving gifts see it as a personal rejection. In either case, though, (1) and (2) imply that one has projected one's own value system and way of thinking and relating on others, rather than understanding that others might think and relate differently.

You can't successfully model a way forward by ignoring or deriding the inter-subjective "we."

I imagine a gifting matrix with usefulness and delightfulness on the x and y axes. Each person has one of these, so 1) a successful gift matches the receiver’s matrix and may not match one’s own (but cannot cross a line in crossing personal boundaries of value system), 2) personal matrices are dynamic, and 3) more people involved creates an increasingly sophisticated polygon model and potentially more cognitive dissonance. What seems like a simple exchange is quite complex.

Gift giving was probably simpler in smaller tribe-based or rigid social structure societies with strict expectations (e.g., Lakota giveaway to share the chief’s bounty and establish his dominance, or late 1700s US giving castoffs to the needy for a complex mix of abundance/sharing/haves versus have nots sorting.) I also believe in the US with the Industrial Revolution and more disposable income, children receiving gifts from Santa was added and expanded to today’s buying opportunities to gift for every occasion from gender reveal to St. Patrick’s Day.

[jacob]

@Scott 2 Do you think mutual understanding is necessary for collaboration or just ideal? This has me questioning that someone can not understand the other and still respect their uniqueness. While it is a possibility, there is also the scenario of not understanding, not caring to do so, and requiring the other person to be wrong to be right.

Kegan to the rescue!?

Kegan2 is the newly converted minimalist who declares that this year they don't want any gifts. "What could be easier than not giving me anything?" They might also be making snide remarks on how wasteful gift giving is and blablabla. Gift giving is seen as a transactional way of exchanging stuff. Methods that can smooth it out is the concept of a wish-list. Wish lists do not seem to be in universal use in the US. To some the suggestion even seem crass. However, it does prevent Kegan3's gifting-love from misfiring in the "do you even know me at all?!?"-sense.

Kegan3 is the person that @ertyu describes to a T. It's important to be seen as someone who thinks of the recipient of the gift, not just by the receiver, but also by others in the company. Whether or not the recipient actually wants a gift is overriden by the importance of giving a gift. Here the focus is not on the stuff that is exchanged as it is on the process of exchanging. Kegan3 feels bad if they're not allowed to give. Getting something or even anything is also better than getting nothing. Lots of polite verbiage here ("What a nice [ugly, really] sweater. That'll keep me warm!"). Same reason why people feel obligated to display the ugly vase from Aunt Oda. The last shelf unit at Walmart is made for these people. To enhance the Kegan3 experience, suggest taking turns opening gifts so only one person opens a gift at a time with everybody else going ooh and aah. This also makes the process last longer. Someone taking initiative can drive a new tradition (Starwars marathon?) and eventually get it to take hold.

Kegan4 is the person who plays along to get along depending on where they are. Perhaps they only exchange gifts with the party where they actually celebrate. Maybe they've negotiated new traditions such as "only children get gifts" or "only the youngest generation of a family branch gets gifts". Unlike Kegan2's individual motives or Kegan3's social motives, Kegan4 understands that different social constructs apply to different social groups and people. Methods here include making strategic choices about who you celebrate with and how.

Kegan5... I'm not even gonna, but this is where people have fun playing around. But just like with "jokes", it's not funny if you have to explain it.

[7Wannabe5]

Kegan3 is the person that @ertyu describes to a T.

I don't agree. What ertyu described was almost verbatim described to me by a very mature, self-aware INFP female friend who was actually the same human who introduced me to the model of the Enneagram. A gift can be a very high level way of sharing a sense of the aesthetic. There may be something of an interplay between artist and muse in the process. "Your beauty inspired me to compose this symphony" is not entirely unlike "Your qualities inspired me to select this gift." If you have never found yourself both delighted and surprised by a gift, then you likely don't have any truly "gifted" gift-givers within your close circle. I am not a "gifted" gift-giver myself, but because I am a female whose primary love languages are those more often associated with men (physical touch and acts of service), I can roughly grok "both/most" sides of love-language-like conflicts in communication. For example, my first husband was very I and very F, so his "love language' was something like "silent quality time" or "sympathetic/empathetic listening", and my natural ability to sit silently and still next to somebody gazing out over a limpid pond in shared sorrowful contemplation* is about the same as that of a 9 month old rat terrier, but I trained myself to the point that I was able to give "the gift of silence" which is an ability/gift that drives my more extroverted partners a bit nutz when I employ it (perhaps towards what you meant by "fun" at Kegan5?) My point here being that this also applies to the skill of becoming more "gifted" at gift-giving by accessing expressive-within-the-tangible SF artist within.

*Yes, I am joking at his expense here, but I also truly appreciated that within co-parenting context, he was the one more suited to dealing with issues such as "I am sad, because other child hurt my feelings." Unfortunately, I feel the need for my partner to help me process my emotions in relationship to other people about as frequently as the median INTJ needs the gift of another festive singing fish wall plaque. However, I did find it amusing when one of my definitely-more-F-then-me poly-partners literally sat on my back and gave me a massage while he griped about the azz-hat celebrity who was on a social justice non-profit board with him. Similarly, the reason I joke about recently divorced men having to pay for my dinner is that I am moderately willing to accept money-spend as towards an "act of service" gift in exchange for my gift of what looks like "empathetic listening." My ideal is when somebody hears me happily babbling about some possibility I imagined or read about in a book and then "magically" makes it real. I have been delighted and surprised every time this has happened. Beyond high level of availability on the market, this is likely why I have been in relationship with quite a few engineers and other types who are good at "construction."

[Frita]

@Jacob Yes and there is also an odd dynamic created when there is a mismatch (or non adjacent gap, like with Wheaten levels). The higher level person meets the other where they are, so there may be more curiosity and amusement rather mutual growth/transformation. Then there can also be a unidirectional, judgy, fit-in-my-box thing to contend with. I am probably not explaining well.

For example, the Christmas I got a new car because all the wives in my spouse’s work group got cars. This was a surprise. I did not need or want a new car and would never have picked that one out. But what a nice guy who fit right in. I could not return it or exchange it. The expectation was that I not drive the old one. My work colleagues and friends thought I was so lucky. Just lots of ick factor…it was rather isolating in an interesting sort of way. The lower person limits the overall shared outcome.

[jacob]

I don't agree. What ertyu described was almost verbatim described to me by a very mature, self-aware INFP female friend who was actually the same human who introduced me to the model of the Enneagram. A gift can be a very high level way of sharing a sense of the aesthetic. There may be something of an interplay between artist and muse in the process. "Your beauty inspired me to compose this symphony" is not entirely unlike "Your qualities inspired me to select this gift." If you have never found yourself both delighted and surprised by a gift, then you likely don't have any truly "gifted" gift-givers within your close circle.

I'm pretty sure I don't have any gifted "gift-givers" in my circle. I acknowledge that a gift can be a very high level of way of sharing a sense of an aesthetic. An aesthetic gift can, however, also be a very low level. For example, gifting exercise equipment to a fat person with the very well intended aesthetic that getting in shape is both healthy and aesthetically hot. However, that's very much a Kegan2 approach that doesn't consider the receiver. "Your unhealthy behavior and appearing like a heart attack waiting to happen or a life expectancy of <70y inspired me to gift you these dumbbells". This is Kegan2. I've actually done that to people when I was young and dumb. It made sense at the time but stupid it/I was. That is a gift is imposing one's aesthetics or values on the receiver.

A Kegan3 perspective on an aesthetic gift would be to indulge the recipient with something that "everybody likes". Take them out for dinner to a fancy place. A trip to a place or an experience they haven't seen before. Get them a gift box from the end-isle of Walmart. It could also be an ugly lamp for their bedstand even if it doesn't look good on yours. Keypoint is that it's something the giver thinks the recipient would like because it's an act of gifting cf. Kegan2 where the gift is an object the recipient ought to like. But ... Kegan3 misfires whenever the recipient doesn't appreciate the process.

Whereas a Kegan4 perspective on an aesthetic gift giving might be something like a new wardrobe or more generally "the next level" of an interest the recipient already pursues. Frankly, at this point, gift-giving gets really difficult because you need to consciously know someone's conscious unconscious needs better than they do themselves. This is like taking a budding hockey player to the store and equipping them properly. A very good gift! The difference between Kegan2 and Kegan4 is understanding how to operate/gift within their [the receiver] ideal. How to make them look good as opposed to imposing your own ideals of what looks good (Kegan2) or whatever you think would look good to the grouping you're currently with (Kegan3).

[ertyu]

I don't agree. What ertyu described was almost verbatim described to me by a very mature, self-aware INFP female friend who was actually the same human who introduced me to the model of the Enneagram.

Correct, this has no relation to Keagan level. I am not v close w Person 1 Gifted Gift-Giver, but I am close with Person 2, and Person 2 has been perfectly willing to hear and respect my personal desires around celebrating birthdays and Christmas.

my first husband was very I and very F, so his "love language' was something like "silent quality time" or "sympathetic/empathetic listening"

asdfgh I came here to have fun but I am honestly feeling so attacked right now <-- this is a thing kids used to say on the internet 5 yrs ago

Mournfully contemplating a thing while co-present then having a deep and meaningful discussion about it sounds great actually

Frita's disctinction along the structure/tradition continuum is wise.

[Frita]

The difference between Kegan2 and Kegan4 is understanding how to operate/gift within their [the receiver] ideal. How to make them look good as opposed to imposing your own ideals of what looks good (Kegan2) or whatever you think would look good to the grouping you're currently with (Kegan3).

And at Kegan 4/5, there is shared communication and exploration about this process. The hunch of knowing what someone would want is followed up to verify understanding and discover if something else could be ever better. I think of the Johari Window communication model for this. As Kegan levels increase, the focus widens from the safety of knowns to discovery of unknowns and creation/co-creation of new knowns.

Also, age and level-of-closeness are other factors as you pointed out with the workout gear. Examples from the receiver side: If my son as a teen gave me gift certificate for a makeover, I would take it better than getting it from my spouse or mother (though it would be less of a surprise from the latter). A close family member giving my fingernail polish would be stranger than receiving it from a work acquaintance. But even writing that, I could envision exploring a different haircut so my new silver hair isn’t quite so jarring or having/attending a manicure party throwback to junior high. There is a different need for negotiation and collaboration when interacting with adult and inner circle people. When that is not possible, there can be grief there to acknowledge and process. (Oh, that is the shift/growth/transformation.)

Each year I bring up the topic of holiday celebrations. What went well? What could be better? Priorities? Thoughts? Needs? Ideas? These conversations are more robust with higher levels of functioning and familiarity/emotional intimacy. Otherwise, they can be challenging, at least for me…which circles back to the empathy-amusement-grieving space of acceptance and being out-of-sync. How do other people navigate this?

[RogueCipher]

It's that time of the year again, and people in my circle are already talking about gifts. I told them I don’t need anything, and we almost agreed—yet, as always, tradition overruled rationality. Now, we’ll have to exchange some nonsensical gifts. I’ve decided not to argue anymore; this topic is so sensitive for some people that I’d rather not hurt their fragile egos.