How to Outsource Buying Gifts for Cherished Loved Ones
It's the delegation that counts
I’m in trouble. Christmas is coming soon, and I have nothing for my wife. I need something heartfelt, something that shows I really know and appreciate her, and something that, judging from her reaction to last year’s gift, in no way resembles a tape dispenser.
Not that I am—excuse me while I take a few breaths into this paper bag—worried about it. What’s the worse she could do? Be disappointed? Get angry with me? Take out a large life insurance policy and slowly poison me with her cooking?
That's absurd. Her cooking would kill me much too quickly. In fact, she has tried to cook for me before. But so far, I have been able to dodge these attempts on my life with clever excuses:
What She Says: I’ve tried a new recipe for mashed potatoes.
What I Hear: I’ve synthesized a “food” product that has the same taste and nutritional content as rubber cement.
My Excuse: I can’t eat that, because I’ve started intermittent fasting, and this is the month I don’t eat.
What She Says: I think it needs a little something.
What I Hear: There is no antidote.
My Excuse: After years of soul-searching, examining my spirituality, and comparing dozens of belief systems from around the world, I have converted to whichever religion forbids me from eating that.
What She Says: What do you think?
What I Hear: May I ask you a question that, according to hundreds of years of marital research, has no good answer?
My Excuse: I can’t in good conscience answer that question, considering how many starving children there are in Africa and upstairs.
These attempts on my life aside, I must turn back to my point. I never know what to get my wife for her birthday. She is difficult to shop for. All she ever wants is a close relationship with people she cares about and who care about her. What am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed to shop for that?
The truth is, I can’t. Last year, I tried to select a gift for my wife using nothing but my own intuition and experience. I don’t know how I could have been so reckless. But this year will be different. This year I am turning to the strategy that husbands have been using to shop for their wives since the Middle Ages: outsourcing.
Outsourcing is a strategy by which you get to abdicate all responsibility for something and make it somebody else’s problem. It is perfect for husbands.
Let me explain how outsourcing works. Take, for example, the arduous task of thinking up an appropriate gift for your wife. Finding the right gift requires you to know a few facts about her—her hobbies, her tastes, whether she has an abundance of Cellophane tape and no way to dispense it, etc. Yet you may have a small problem, which is that the only intimate thing you know about your wife, at least among the things that truly matter, is that her car is due for an oil change.
Enter outsourcing. Through the advanced software engineering technique of typing “last-minute gifts for wife” into Google, you are immediately besieged by dozens of Amazon-affiliated relationship bloggers who have written sympathetic, nonjudgmental blog posts with titles like “The Good-for-Nothing Husband’s Guide to Inexpensive Gift Ideas for Wives Who Frankly Could Do Better.” And just like that, you have dozens of great gift ideas that will show your wife just how much you care about keeping a lid on the price.
That’s all there is to it. With just a little technical know-how, you can successfully outsource the task of thinking up an appropriate gift. In fact, as I was writing the previous paragraph, I surveyed a few of these blog posts while considering my wife's needs and, after opening my eyes to see which item was beneath the finger I pressed to the screen, I selected the perfect gift: a cookbook.