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I’m bad at gifts. Always have been.
You know that polite smile your wife gives you when she opens something on Christmas morning? The one where she’s clearly trying to be grateful but you can tell she’s thinking “this is from the airport, isn’t it.” Yeah. I’ve seen that smile more times than I want to admit.
And it’s not like I don’t care. I do. I just get busy with work and the kids and whatever else, and then suddenly it’s December 22nd and I’m on Amazon filtering by “arrives before Christmas.” That’s not being thoughtful. That’s panic mode.
My buddy Mike called me out on this maybe four years ago. We were grabbing beers after his kid’s soccer game and I was complaining about not knowing what to get Sarah for her birthday. He just looked at me and said “dude, you know this stuff actually matters to her, right?”
I didn’t have a good response. Because he was right.
The Big Stuff vs. The Small Stuff
Here’s the thing — I’m good at the big stuff. Most of us are. We make sure there’s money coming in. We check that the doors are locked at night. We change the oil, fix what’s broken, handle the stuff that keeps everything running. That’s what we do. Protector, provider, all that.
But somewhere along the way I think a lot of us decided that was enough. Like, she should just know I love her because I’m out here working my ass off for this family every day. Right?
Except. Knowing you’re loved and actually feeling it? Apparently those are different things. Took me a while to figure that out.
The guys I know who seem to have really good marriages — and I mean the ones where their wives actually seem happy, not just tolerating them — they’ve figured out the small stuff matters. Maybe more than the big stuff sometimes. Or at least, the small stuff is what she actually remembers.
What I Started Noticing
So I started paying attention to what these guys were doing differently. Not the guys who buy their wives a Peloton for Christmas (we all saw how that commercial went). I mean the regular guys whose wives just seem… content. Like they’re with someone who gets them.
Few things stood out.
They actually listen. Like, their wife mentions some random thing — a book she saw, a restaurant her coworker told her about, whatever — and they file it away somewhere. Then three months later it shows up as a birthday gift or a surprise. That’s not about money. It’s just about paying attention. Which, honestly, is harder than it sounds when you’ve got fifteen other things running through your head at any given moment.
They plan ahead. Way ahead. Mike — same guy who called me out — keeps a running note on his phone. Just gift ideas. Anytime his wife mentions something, he adds it to the list. So when her birthday comes around he’s got like eight options ready to go. No panic. No “what size does she wear again” texts to her sister. Just picks something from the list.
I started doing this too. Game changer. Seriously.
They notice what she won’t do for herself. This one took me longer to get. Sarah will spend money on the kids without thinking twice. New shoes, activities, whatever they need. But something for herself? She’ll look at it, want it, and then talk herself out of it every single time. “I don’t really need it.” So now sometimes I just… get it. Not because she asked. Because I was paying attention when she didn’t.
The Walla Walla Trip
Ok so here’s an example. My buddy Chris and his wife drove out to Walla Walla last spring — wine country in eastern Washington, if you’ve never been. They did the whole thing, hit a bunch of tasting rooms, made a weekend of it.
On the way back to their hotel Chris sees his wife duck into a coffee shop, so he wanders into this little artisan place next door. Detour Farms or something like that. They make candles and home fragrance stuff, small batch, all handmade by some local woman. He grabbed a couple reed diffusers — the stick-in-a-bottle kind — because he thought they were nice and they smelled like the trip.
Gave one to his wife a few weeks later. Random Tuesday. No occasion.
Now it’s in their bedroom and apparently every time she smells it she’s back in Walla Walla with him. There’s actually science behind that — smell goes straight to the part of your brain that handles memory and emotion. Anyway. Thirty bucks. And he didn’t figure it out on December 22nd — he just saw something while he was there and grabbed it.
That’s the whole point. You see the opportunity, you take it. You don’t wait for the “perfect moment” because you’ll forget and then you’re back on Amazon at midnight.
It Doesn’t Have to Be Expensive
I should probably say — none of this is about spending a lot of money. Some of the stuff that’s landed best for me cost basically nothing.
I wrote Sarah a note once. Just a random Wednesday. Told her a few specific things I noticed she’d been doing for our family that week, and that I saw her, and I was grateful. She still has it in her nightstand. That was three years ago.
Took the kids out for a few hours last month so she could have the house to herself. No agenda, just wanted her to have quiet. She almost cried.
It’s not complicated. It’s just… actually thinking about her. Which sounds obvious but apparently I needed someone to spell it out for me.
Anyway
We just got through the holidays. Mother’s Day is in a few months. Then probably her birthday. Then anniversary, Valentine’s Day, and suddenly it’s Christmas again. It never stops.
I’m trying to be better about getting ahead of it this year. Started the note on my phone. Actually writing things down when she mentions them. Paying attention.
I don’t know. Maybe you’re already good at this stuff. Maybe you’re worse than me. But if you’re anything like I was — always scrambling, always last minute, always getting that polite smile — it’s worth thinking about.
She puts up with a lot. They all do. The least we can do is make her feel like we notice.
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This content is brought to you by Shiraz Kahn
Photos provided by the author.
