20-Year-Old Man Wonders If He’s Wrong For Insulting The ‘Lazy Excuse For A Gift’ His Girlfriend Got Him For His Birthday
“So, if we break up, do I get to keep the gift and give it to my next partner?”
Fizkes | Shutterstock.com After splurging on his girlfriend's birthday, the now 20-year-old college student was excited when his girlfriend told him she had a birthday surprise for him.
While he didn’t expect anything extravagant, he did expect something sentimental, especially after being together for over a year. “She came out of the room in a lingerie set that she said was new,” he wrote in a Reddit post. “She looked hot. We fooled around. That’s that … Afterwards, she asked what I thought of her present.”
A young man took to Reddit asking if he was wrong for calling his girlfriend's birthday surprise a 'lazy excuse for a gift.’
Always cognizant of being thoughtful, compassionate, and giving to his girlfriend, he couldn’t help but feel like he wasn’t receiving the same kind of love back. Even after bringing it up with her, he felt equally unheard and underappreciated.
Marjan Apostolovic | Shutterstock
“I thought a lot about planning her birthday,” he wrote in a comment under the post. “But, for mine, it seems like she was in Victoria’s Secret and just thought, ‘Yeah, this will do.’”
It seemed like his resentment went well beyond his birthday surprise, however. “She often prioritizes her girlfriends over me …They will ALWAYS come first. It feels selfish,” he confessed.
Instead of gifting him a heartfelt surprise, his girlfriend bought lingerie for herself — ‘If we break up, do I keep it and give it to my next partner?’
After being gifted with lingerie, which was really just a present for his girlfriend to keep, this Reddit poster said he was genuinely having second thoughts about the future of their relationship.
He wrote, “I was a bit confused, and this is when she inferred that the lingerie was my present. It rubbed me the wrong way… It felt like a lazy excuse for a gift.”
Miljan Zivkovic | Shutterstock.com
“To me, she bought something for herself and said it was a gift to me,” he added. “I might have been an [expletive] for this comment: ‘So if we break up, do I get to keep that and give it to my next partner?”
Of course, at this point, the Reddit poster’s resentment had taken over the conversation, and he said his girlfriend was purely defensive.
He explained, “My comment also rubbed her the wrong way… I’m just upset because I took her out to a fancy dinner for her birthday, which is no small cost for a 20-year-old without a job.”
There's clearly a disconnect in their relationship that goes far beyond his birthday gift.
As many commenters asserted, intimacy isn’t a present. It’s a part of a healthy and loving relationship. Sexologist Dr. Nikki Goldstein explained, "In long-term relationships, we should be having sex for healthier reasons. These include to bond, to feel close to our partners, to feel in a better mood with them, to connect, to be intimate, to feel pleasure and to enjoy something together. These are not things you achieve necessarily from giving sex as a gift or using it to celebrate. These are things a relationship needs to thrive 365 days of the year."
This birthday gift seemed to be transactional in all the wrong ways. “Effort goes a long way,” one person wrote, “and it seems to be disproportionately balanced here.”
Of course, many people, including author Alyssa Zanderon TikTok, argued that resentment is your indicator that you’re either “doing too much” in a relationship or not receiving the same support, love, and respect you give from your partner.
If there’s some kind of disconnect — whether it’s gift-giving, time with friends, or communication — they need to get honest with each other. An open conversation is the only healthy way to move forward.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a News & Entertainment Writer at YourTango who focuses on health & wellness, social policy, and human interest stories