1. Herpes
“Herpes.”
2. Clueless
“I am a classical music enthusiast. I own over 7000 classical albums, play various instruments, subscribe to classical music magazines, go to live concerts regularly and used to have my own classical radio show.
One birthday, my SO at the time bought me a CD of ‘Your 20 favorite classical melodies’ – and it wasn’t a joke! I realized then how little she understood my life.”
3. It Was Borrowed
“My boyfriend in high school gave me a True Love Waits virginity key ring in a fancy jewelry box. Then said I had to give the box back. He borrowed it from his mom. And I suspect the key ring was secondhand from church camp.”
4. You’re Just Like My Mom, Right?
“My very first boyfriend called me up one day and told me he was at a garden center, and he wanted to pick out a stone statue for his mom as a gift. He told me there was a sea lion, a mermaid, and a few others. Which one did he think his mom would like?
I was like, ‘Well, you know your mom better than me, but I think she would like the sea lion one.’
Cut to a few weeks later on my birthday, he gives me a weirdly shaped present that’s really crazy heavy, and I open it to find a stone sea lion garden statue sitting in front of me.
First off, I was living in an apartment, so I didn’t even have a garden. Second off, when I gave him this suggestion, I was thinking about his MOM, not me. And third off, I could probably let this slide if we had only been dating for a few months or even a year, but at this point we had been together for FOUR YEARS. I never gave him any indication a stone statue would be something I was interested in, so…so like what the hell was he thinking?
Another little WTF detail, I was majoring in marine biology at the time and he knew that my least favorite ocean animals were marine mammals. INCLUDING SEA LIONS.”
5. Oink
“An ex once bought me a giant ceramic pig statue because I pointed it out once in a store and said I thought it was cute. It was probably half a metre by half a metre and weighed a ton.
We were long distance, and he gave me this the day before I had to take the train home. Needless to say, I left it at his apartment.”
6. Sex Positions He Won’t Try
“A sex position book with full graphics on Valentine’s Day. I liked the book but kinda pissed because he wasn’t willing to try any positions. Like why give it to me in the first place. Fucking tease.”
7. Not Chocolate
“He asked me to close my eyes, and I thought it was gonna be good. Them he asked me to get on my knees, so I thought it would be really good. And then open my mouth… So a really good chocolate?
Nope. Was dick.”
8. Get To Work, Wifey
“Pretty sure there’s some unspoken rule that you don’t give your wife a vacuum for her birthday. My husband ignored that rule.”
9. The Scam Artist
“A gift card to the restaurant I worked at. Really!? Like I wouldn’t want to eat somewhere else/fancier? Someplace I didn’t talk about how dirty the kitchen was? He was dumped shortly afterwards. (Hope you enjoyed your 42″ flatscreen parting gift. Merry Christmas asshole)
Whew. I feel much better now.”
10. He Made Me Plan My Own Birthday
“My ex and I recently broke up because I felt like I was making all the decisions and shouldering all the responsibility in the relationship. He knew that, since last summer.
It so happens that recently, my birthday, Christmas and our first anniversary were within a few weeks. I got him a big, fairly expensive (not awful) present that I spent a ton if time and effort on, including lugging it home from college, and a smaller sweet present (“book of memories” kinda thing).
His idea was to tell me way beforehand that he was taking me to eat for my birthday (fine, that’s awesome) at a place of my choosing and that I would call the shots the whole day.
It was the least thoughtful present he could have given me. He made me choose my own present after all the time we had talked about me feeling like he put no effort in. He didn’t even TRY to surprise me, to make it feel better — it would have been awesome if he even said “I’m taking you here,” but he spent absolutely the least amount of time on it that he could have.
He also wouldn’t accept the present I put a ton of effort into.”
11. An Offer You Can’t Refuse
“A dead fish for Christmas. :(
It was supposed to be alive, but it was still pretty Godfather horses-head-in-the-bed level alarming initially.”
12. …Get To Work, Wifey
“My ex husband got me an ironing board for Christmas.”
13. Still Strangers After All These Years
“My wife got me a kit to make jerky. Like beef jerky. I don’t eat beef jerky. I don’t like beef jerky.
And we’ve been married for 15 years – it’s not like she doesn’t know this.”
14. Worship With Me
“An expensive ornate King James Bible.”
15. Irony?
“A ‘Pipi Max.’ It’s a toy dog that drinks and pees like a real dog. I already had 4 real dogs at the time.”
16. “The Food Was Good”
“I don’t have a SO at the moment, so this story is from when I was with my ex-wife.
She took me, my son, my parents, and her friends out to eat at a Chinese restaurant. I had to pay the bill, and then buy her and her friends ice cream afterwards. We went down to the docks to watch the boats and she spent the entire time on her phone texting other men while my son and I chatted about Africa.
We got home and I was hinting that I wanted some birthday sex at least. She said that was the plan. When we walked in the house, she got on her computer while I took a shower and freshened up for her. Waited on the bed for a while, and then gave up and went to sleep.
She came to bed around 3-4 AM and when I felt her lay beside me, I rolled towards her and slid a hand along her, hinting that even though I was half-asleep, I was still up for it. She told me she was too tired, so I rolled back over and went back to sleep.
The food was good, though.”
17. Have Another, Lamer, Version Of The Thing You Already Have
“The worst thing I ever got from my SO was an iPod Touch. She knew I had no need for an iPod because I already owned one. The one she gave me had even less memory than the already had, it was a truly terrible gift.”
18. Sup ‘K’
“A bracelet that he told me he got from a thrift store.
It was had old thick worn guitar hanging from it and one of them had a bejeweled ‘K’ on it…and my name doesn’t even start with a ‘K’…nothing in my life can be associated with a ‘K’…
So yea that was weird.”
19. A…Shortsighted Choice
“A telescope from the Dollar Store. It didn’t work very well and then fell apart.”
20. A Burning Passion…For Not Listening
“Despite my hatred of roses, my ex insisted on giving me roses for Every. Single. Event. My birthday, graduation, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, etc. I always thanked him and tried to kindly remind him that I hate roses, but the more he gave them to me the more pissed off I got. I even threatened to start lighting them on fire and he STILL gave them to me. To me it just said he couldn’t listen to me.”
21. A Thoughtful Man
“An ex gave me his old dirty bandana and a button from SakuraCon because he had two. He lied about going to the convention so he wouldn’t have to pay for me, then bought himself some really cool knives and I get one of the buttons he got for free…dumped him soon after.”
22. Smoke Up, Johnny!
“My girlfriend at the time got me a 6 pack of Bud Lite and 2 packs of cigarettes. She then proceeded to drink the beer.”
23. Just Weird
“Had a girl give me a tube of shampoo on the first date. Not bad really, just weird.”
24. Happy Birthday To Me
“A pair of sneakers… For himself… For My birthday… (he spent $140 on the shoes and got me nothing)…”
25. It’s For Both Of Us But Mainly Me
“She bought me a wireless printer so she could use the printer for photos. I haven’t used it once.”
26. “Love Me Tender”
“My first ‘real’ relationship – in the sense that it involved mutual mushing-together of naughty bits – began when I was sixteen years old. It lasted for two and a half years after that, which I’ve been told is fairly impressive for a couple in high school. Truth be told, that span of time is most notable when you consider the fact that the young woman and I were almost completely incompatible… and that was never more evident than when she tried to give me gifts.
During our first Christmas together, my then-girlfriend gave me a pair of hand weights, of the sort that might be held by a jogger wearing leggings. They had clearly been purchased from the bargain bin at the local thrift store… but I told myself it was the thought that mattered (even if I wasn’t sure that any thought had gone into the gift at all). Besides, we had only been dating for about three months, and it was probably unfair of me to expect anything at all.
Unfortunately, that would set the stage for every gift I’d receive from the girl.
I need to pause for a moment and explain something about this young woman. Although she was ambitious and talented, she had almost zero patience for practice or preparation. Her idea of putting on a poetry performance, for example, was to get up on stage and improvise while using a tone of voice that made it sound like she was reciting something. That would have been fine, except for the fact that she was really bad at improvisation, and she had a tendency to lie about how much work she’d done on something.
Please keep that in mind when I tell you this:
For my eighteenth birthday, this young woman – who was also, I should mention, completely tone-deaf – forced me to sit in a plastic folding chair for as long as it took her to ‘sing’ her way through three love songs by Elvis Presley. I hated Elvis at the time, and watching this girl attempt (and fail) to mumble her way through ‘Love Me Tender’ was as close to torture as I’d been through.
Worse still, I had to sit back and pretend that I enjoyed it… because as she’d told me, she’d worked really hard on it.” 
