My husband and I have been married 28 years. Over the years he has given me gifts of jewelry. I usually don’t wear jewelry, not even a watch. His first gift was a pair of small diamond stud earrings for our first anniversary. I had to get my ears pierced in order to wear them. I did not want to hurt his feelings.
His taste is different than mine and we have usually exchanged his gifts to me together and picked out something I like together. For our nineteenth anniversary, he bought me an 18 k gold Gucci bracelet for $1600!
I would NEVER spend this kind of money on something like this! The 18 k gold looked like brass on my wrist and I asked him to return it. He said he would. I found it on the shelf the next week. That’s when I found the receipt! I tried to return it to the store, but they refused to take it back. The receipt was marked “No refunds”.
I figured I would give it to our daughter when she got older or I could pawn it if necessary ( my husband lost his job a short time later and was unemployed for over a year and a half, I supported the family). It stayed in its box for several years on the shelf in the closet, then I quietly moved it to a drawer in my dresser.
Over a year after I moved it, my husband searched for the bracelet, found it in my drawer, and gave it to a “children’s orphanage”. (No charity tax deductions were ever taken on our taxes). He told me about this a year or so after he had done it. He claimed that, since I had asked him to return it, I had “given it back to him and that it belonged to him and he could do whatever he wanted with it”.
Is he right? (I suspect he gave it to his greedy sister who loves jewelry and never cared much for me). I was stunned by his actions because I never made a big deal about the bracelet other than to ask that he not buy anything that could not be returned. What do you think? — Diane
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Diane, there are bigger issues here than you disliking the gifts he gives you, aren’t there? Do you know how many women would give just about anything to get any kind of gift from their husbands?
Anyway, I think the bracelet is a symptom of something else going wrong in your marriage. Have you consider counseling, for the both of you and/or each of you individually? — Queenie