Feminist Advice Friday: My husband sucks at gifts and holidays. How can I get him to change?

A reader asks…

Another Valentine’s Day has come and gone with no acknowledgment. And maybe I might fall for my husband’s “It’s a made up holiday” if this didn’t happen on every single holiday. He knows when Christmas is. He knows we have an anniversary because he was fucking there when we got married. And yet year after year, nothing. What the fuck? I’m sorry, I meant: what can I do, aside from killing him?

My answer:

I admire your commitment to holding your husband accountable by murder if necessary, as well as your realization that he is fully capable of remembering and acknowledging holidays. This already puts you light years ahead of many cisgendered women, who dismiss such behavior as funny and just the way men are. But don’t sharpen your machete just yet.

I’m a big fan of holding men accountable for this “oops I forgot every holiday but also somehow didn’t forget to expect a present for myself” nonsense. It is not an accident that it’s disproportionately cisgender heterosexual women making holiday magic and disproportionately cisgender heterosexual men benefiting from the magic while offering nothing in return.

The fight over presents, over remembering anniversaries, over treating life as something special rather than as pure drudgery is not trivial.

You have a right to ask your partner to meet your needs, and to respond to your hopes for your relationship, whatever those hopes might be. And when those hopes are something as easy, normal, and normative as giving you fucking presents for major holidays…yeah, it’s fucking terrible that he seems not to care.

Before you burn the marriage down, though, I want you to pause and take a deep breath: Have you asked him, in clear and specific language, to honor this wish? Have you told him how important it is to you? Because some people really do grow up in families where either presents don’t happen or where (it makes me mad to even say this) kids learn that presents flow one way: away from, not to, mom.

It sucks when the people we love seem not to know what we need, especially when it’s something super obvious, but that’s life. We’re all bad at certain things. So give your husband the benefit of the doubt, and tell him that you need presents for holidays to feel loved. Give him a list of those holidays. Emphasize this is important to you. Then wait.

If it doesn’t happen on the next holiday, then you know: This is a deliberate choice.

And a deliberate choice to disregard your needs is profoundly awful no matter what those needs are. Should it happen that your husband continues to refuse to buy you presents or remember holidays, it’s time to answer some questions about your relationship:

• Are you going out of your way to make the holidays special, while he sits back and does nothing?

• Are there other ways in which he treats your needs as insignificant?

• What’s the division of household labor like? Does he make up for his gift-giving failures in other ways, or is this just one of many ways in which you give and he takes?

• What is he contributing to your life? The marriage?

• Are you happy with this man? Does he make your life better? Do you share goals?

You need to spend some serious time reflecting on whether the gift giving issue reveals something deeper about his character, and about your marriage.

And then, should you consider leaving him? Going on strike? Maybe. He’ll of course say you did it because he forgot a holiday, but it’s never really about a holiday, is it? Only you can decide if this is a small but significant irritation, or part of a larger pattern.

I publish #feministadvicefriday every Friday(ish) here and on Facebook. You can get early access to Feminist Advice Friday, as well as other content I don’t publish anywhere else, by subscribing for free to my Substack newsletter. You can submit your own question to zawn.villines@gmail.com, by messaging my Facebook page, or anonymously by using this site’s contact form.