If you are a spender, you will have little difficulty purchasing gifts for your spouse; but if you are a saver, you will experience emotional resistance to the idea of spending money as an expression of love. You don’t purchase things for yourself. Why should you purchase things for your spouse? But that attitude fails to recognize that you are purchasing things for yourself. By saving and investing money you are purchasing self-worth and emotional security. You are caring for your own emotional needs in the way you handle money. What you are not doing is meeting the emotional needs of your spouse. If you discover that your spouse’s primary love language is receiving gifts, then perhaps you will understand that purchasing gifts for him or her is the best investment you can make. You are investing in your relationship and filling your spouse’s emotional love tank, and with a full love tank, he or she will likely reciprocate emotional love to you in a language you will understand. When both persons’ emotional needs are met, your marriage will take on a whole new dimension. Don’t worry about your savings. You will always be a saver, but to invest in loving your spouse is to invest in blue-chip stocks.
— The 5 Love Languages (Gary Chapman), Loc. 957–65
How much do the gifts cost?
Oct 2026 comment:
Oh, for fuck’s sake! Isn’t that the reason this civilization accumulated so much shitty things nobody needs? I may never understand the fucking gift-receivers. Grow the fuck up already, you little piece of child. How old are you? Do you really need just another thing? Over and over and over again? Do you? Really? Do you really need to update iPhone 17 Pro Max for iPhone 18 Pro Max? I mean, cool, you have the money for that? But perhaps you’re just a miserable idiot having no meaning in your pathetic life? Have you even considered that? If you’re so fucking desperate for gifts, would you maybe, I don’t know, do something with your life. Go to therapy. Help someone with their lives, donate those money to someone in actual need? And you may feel you’re a bit less empty even.
I don’t know. It’s hard for me tolerating this in humans. Fucking cancer of this planet. Just buy another tonne of plastic for Christmas, instead of spending quality time with your family, and getting to actually know them.
Years later, I dislike this book for equalising one meaningful things with some absolutely meaningless ones. Gifts do not equal with quality time and undivided attention. How stupid a person should be to actually think that way?