Christmas is a magical time when everyone who celebrates exchanges presents and spends an amazing time with each other. Well, of course, if they're lucky to have nice people in their life. Because sometimes even a person you've spent 10 years in marriage with can just simply not get you a present due to some bizarre reason.
Of course, we are talking about a particular story here - a woman came to Reddit to tell a story about how her husband of 10 years weaponized his incompetence and left her without the slightest gift under the Christmas tree.
More info: Reddit
A woman would always take care of buying gifts and notify her husband afterwards, but he decided to use it against her the one time she didn't remind him about it
Image credits: Matthias Cooper (not the actual photo)
The author of the story describes how she was in South Africa for work during the holiday season and simply decided to buy all the gifts while she was there
Image credits: Brett Wood (not the actual photo)
As she's been the one buying gifts for around 10 years now, she decided to just get everything and skipped giving her husband the details about what she bought
Image credits: RDNE Stock project (not the actual photo)
When she finally put all the gifts under the Christmas tree, she noticed that her husband couldn't even prepare a measly gift for her
Image credits: Immediate_Mobile5825
Confronted about this, the husband turned it around on her, calling his wife's actions "underhanded", while she hints at believing he was simply lazy — as always
The OP and her husband have been married for nearly 10 years. And apparently, this year’s Christmas incident brought this marriage to an end. But before we get to this point, let’s start from the beginning.
The husband always says that he’s not good at buying gifts, which makes the wife the assigned gift buyer. She also thinks that the husband is not so much bad at buying gifts as he’s simply lazy and weaponizes his incompetence.
Weaponized incompetence is a phenomenon when a person fakes being incompetent in order to avoid certain tasks. It can also be called strategic incompetence.
Quite often it is used by men in relationships to avoid certain chores, like gift-buying for Christmas. By constantly pretending to be unskilled, they push the responsibility to their partner. And that creates an unequal division of domestic labor, which can over time cause some problems in the relationship. For example, it can build resentment, lack of trust, emotional disconnection, and even conflict.
Image credits: Juliana Malta (not the actual photo)
Coming back to the Reddit story, this year the OP was sent to work in South Africa, and since she’s always responsible for buying gifts, she decided to buy them there. She also decided not to call him to inform him about what gifts she was buying, as it was her money which was buying the gifts. In the end, under the Christmas tree she put gifts both for her daughters and her husband.
Sadly, when Christmas morning arrived, the OP didn’t find any presents under the tree that were meant for her. Apparently, the husband decided not to get her one because she didn’t tell him she was buying all the other gifts. He felt uninvolved, so supposedly didn't have time to plan to get a gift for his wife.
This flabbergasted the woman. It’s Christmas, of course there are going to be gifts! How could he have thought otherwise? Well, he replied that he was used to being informed about gifts and things not happening in his usual way threw him off.
Well, his answer threw the OP off. Or, to be more specific, drove her to the edge of planning to leave him. After all, everyone deserves a gift on Christmas, right?
That's what the folks online thought too. They were shocked by what a high-level jerk the woman was married to. Some even went to the extent of calling him a "useless" human. Others shared their similar experiences being in a relationship with such "useless" people and advised the woman on how she should handle her situation. In a nutshell, the OP deserves better!
The Reddit community completely absolved the poster, saying that she wasn't a jerk, but was rather married to a real big one
