What would you do if your spouse decided to gift you something humiliating and crazy for Christmas, and they did it with their whole family as an audience?
Five years ago, this 28-year-old woman married her 29-year-old husband, and they started dating back in college. They have been trying to have children, but after what her husband gifted her for Christmas this year, she doesn’t think bringing a baby into the world is a good idea right now.
All along, she thought she had the ins and outs of her husband’s personality and interests down, though she’s currently doubting that she really knew him at all.
“We’ve always communicated any issues we’ve ever had and always resolved them or found different ways to handle them. So now when I speak of this, it’s something that came completely left field for me, at least relationship-wise,” she explained.
“My husband has never been the type to have any weird [likes]; between the two of us, he had always been the more vanilla one, while I was more open to experimenting a bit bedroom-wise. I can’t stress enough how vanilla my husband truly is and was up until this moment.”
For Christmas, she and her husband spent it with his side of the family, since her loved ones live a few states away and plane tickets were far too expensive to purchase to go see them.
This isn’t the first time she’s spent the holiday with her in-laws, and they have an exciting tradition of having a wonderful Christmas Eve dinner followed by a sleepover, so everyone can get up on Christmas morning to open gifts like they’re all children again.
It’s so much fun to participate in this tradition, and it’s important for you to know that her husband buys the best Christmas presents, since gift-giving is his love language.
“Last year, he gifted me a nearly identical replica of an old stuffed bunny I used to have when I was younger, but lost in a house fire that happened when I was 8, which he managed to find through the only two photos existing of me as a kid holding it,” she added.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
Anyway, there they all were sitting around when her husband opened up her present, which was a carving tool set since he picked up woodworking recently.
When she unwrapped the gift her husband got for her, she was shocked to see a pink colored dog collar, and the tiny bone tag on it had her name engraved.
Her mother-in-law was right next to her when she pulled the collar out, and could tell that she was disturbed. Her mother-in-law didn’t quite know how to deal with the gift either and shot her husband a perplexed look.
Her husband was still grinning from ear to ear, acting like this was some meaningful or lavish gift he purchased for her, and then his expression changed to one of disappointment.
“I actually started laughing because how else are you supposed to react to a gift like that? I have no history with dogs, as I was actually a notorious cat lover growing up and had several as pets throughout the years,” she said.
“My husband, in front of his entire family, kept gesturing towards the collar and told me to give it a try on to see if it fit. I felt so embarrassed.”
“We had always experimented with certain things, but never anything like this, and he made it seem like some open [interest] we had in front of his entire family. I asked him why he thought I would want something like this, and he kept trying to save face by saying it was just something new he wanted to try out.”
Disgusted, she essentially tossed the collar at him and went to sit alone in the car to collect herself. Her husband followed her outside, puzzled and angry that she was not appreciative of the gift.
She finally just drove away from him and went to stay with one of her best single friends, whom she sobbed to about the incident. She’s been at her friend’s house ever since, and her husband has been calling and texting her nonstop.
She has no idea how to move past such a humiliating and insane gift, because, as she said, she and her husband do not have a dog, and he didn’t pull a puppy out from underneath the Christmas tree.
“Why would he think it was okay to embarrass me like that in front of his family? It feels so out of character for him to do something like this,” she continued.
I’m almost speechless over this, but my first thought is that if he’s normally so thoughtful and kind, she should ask him to get checked out by a doctor, since this seems to be a severe shift.
Otherwise, she indicated that there are no other personality changes or things that he’s doing that she would deem out of the ordinary.
If a doctor can’t find something clinical to explain this one away, I can’t figure out why on earth he would buy her a dog collar. It makes absolutely no sense! Especially since he intended it for her, as her name was on the tag.
What advice do you have for her?
You can read the original post below.
By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
