If I’d known it would be the last ever gift I would give my husband, I’d have chosen something better. It was March 2020, and on the day of his birthday, I was in Istanbul for a work trip, giving a talk at a conference and exploring the city. It was my last excursion before the pandemic lockdown, and looking back now, it seems like another world, where people still hugged each other freely and shared bites of food from each other’s plates.
He never had enough pens for work (he was an academic), so I bought him one from a little independent stationery shop. I can’t pretend it was an imaginative choice, let alone a lavish one. Although the pen was gilt-edged and shiny, it was a rollerball.
The men in the shop seemed surprised that I didn’t haggle, but I felt that the price was proof of my love for my husband. It wrote smoothly and had a good weight in my hand. I stepped out of the shop, bathed in the beautiful haze of Istanbul, and couldn’t wait to fly home and give it to him.
After more than 25 years and three children together, it was sometimes hard to think of gifts that wouldn’t become yet more clutter. Yet the urge—or the duty—was still alive. His was the face I thought of when I ate my breakfasts of olives and salty sheep cheese with a view of the Bosphorus. “Miss you!” I texted him, telling him about the extraordinary market I had just visited.
Three months later, we were sitting on a park bench in Cambridge when he told me he didn’t love me anymore, “not like that.” He added that he hadn’t done so for “three years, maybe four.” He never explained what “like that” meant. The phrase tormented me. If he didn’t love me, why had he said that he did, so many times, in so many different ways? And why was he now trying to kiss me, right here on this park bench? Only a week earlier, he had walked into the garden and said how beautiful my hair looked in the light. I was stunned and confused. The day had started like any other, with him bringing me a cup of tea in bed. Although we both worked too hard, we still shared a life and a bed. It would be another couple of months before he dropped off the letter telling me about the new person he had fallen in love with.
After he left, I found myself taking stock not just of the relationship but also of all the objects our relationship had given rise to, relics of a love that was now broken. Many of our household possessions seemed, to my grief-stricken brain, to be charmed or cursed. With his love gone, the tactile comfort of touching the salad bowl or piano had seeped away. Two months into the separation, the heart-shaped tin in which I had baked our wedding cake fell to the ground, seeming to leap off the dresser shelf where it was stored. It felt like a sign.
I wandered the house, searching for clues that our relationship was always doomed. But what I found instead were endless reminders of how we had marked one another’s birthdays and Christmases right up until the end. Over years and decades, he had given me so many well-chosen books, so many fragrant bottles of bubble bath, and—completely unexpectedly—a garden shed in which to write, although he ended up using it more than I did. I had given him dozens of bottles of Armani Eau Pour Homme, a clean scent he never deviated from nor ever seemed disappointed by. I also gave him bourbon and ballet tickets and a blue suit that was his favorite. The hanger in our closet that had once held it was now forlornly empty.
Our presents to one another were so much folded into the fabric of our shared lives that I almost forgot who gave what to whom. There was the cream-colored kitchen radio that I got to console him after I suffered a miscarriage and he was plunged into sorrow for a baby he would never hold. Or the mezzaluna he bought me that we both loved using to chop herbs. He trudged to multiple kitchenware shops before he found one because I wasn’t the only Nigella Lawson fan hankering after mezzalunas that year.
His thoughtful generosity was one of the things I loved about him—that and his loyalty, which made me feel secure enough to do anything I wanted in life, so long as I didn’t ask him to dance (he hated dancing) or give him flowers (they triggered his allergies) or invite friends round too often (he was at his happiest when it was just the two of us, a DVD, and a bottle of wine). His sister told me he said that he had never so much as looked at another woman with desire in all those years he’d been with me. Until now.
People can move on shockingly fast—he remarried just 18 months after he left—whereas the things accumulated over the course of a long marriage are not so quick to disentangle. In my drawers, I still had two cashmere sweaters he had given me, far more expensive than any garment I ever bought for myself, which I couldn’t bring myself to abandon. Arriving at the door one day to pick up our son, it startled me to see that he was still wearing a petrol blue sweater I had given him one Christmas, although I quickly regretted my choice because it never fit him very well. I wondered how he could leave me and yet stay attached to that unflattering top.
It started to occur to me that the gifts of my marriage—whether received or given—were not necessarily the simple and tender reflections of affection I had believed them to be. I found a whole literature to support this: Marcel Mauss insisted that gift giving—at least among tribes—can be a display of power and competition rather than a sign of love. Mauss believed that there was always an ulterior motive, even if it was simply to make the other person like you more.
The first gift I ever gave him back in the 1990s was a cheap little paperback copy of the poems of George Herbert. My motive then had been to impress him with my good taste. He wasn’t yet my husband and had been one of my college professors, although our first kiss—and my gift—only happened after he’d stopped teaching me. I was 19 when we met, though the power imbalance didn’t seem to matter then; he was only seven years older.
When I gave him that book of poetry, it was several months after we had fallen in love and started seeing each other in secret. I chose the book because Herbert’s words were some of the most thrilling and erotic I had ever read, even though he was a 17th-century priest who was directing his love to God: “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat.”
These lines reminded me of the first time my husband asked me out to dinner. Many of my student friends subsisted mainly on instant noodles and toast, but he had a car and could drive me to a place with tablecloths and candles. He ordered oysters and steak tartare. My childhood had left me with social anxiety and a disordered relationship with food. I felt that he was giving me permission to live and eat again.
One of the mysteries of marriage is that, if things take a wrong turn, you can find yourself knowing a person less rather than more as time goes on. Our gifts had become tokens exchanged by strangers. We were both so polite and good at avoiding difficult conversations that much of our inner lives had become inaccessible to each other long before he left, even though we chatted all the time. In the final few years before the split, buying him presents sometimes felt dull, in a way it never did at the start. I would stand in menswear departments wondering what the point was in buying him yet another piece of knitwear when—like the lover in Nina Simone’s song—he didn’t much care for clothes.
A couple of years before he left, he gave me a bottle of Jo Malone Pear Freesia cologne. When I smelled it, I had a visceral reaction of dislike. Is this how you want me to smell? I thought. It’s a lovely perfume, discreet and summery. It just didn’t smell like me. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said that gifts were a way to control the other person. Even the thought that my husband could imagine me smelling like this made me feel trapped. Not wanting to hurt his feelings, I thanked him profusely but left the perfume unsprayed, just as he left the Istanbul pen I gave him untouched in its box.
There are things you can’t understand when you are in the middle of them, no matter how hard you squint. It takes distance to see the truth.
Giving each other gifts, I now saw, was neither necessary nor sufficient to keep a marriage alive. Nearly two years after my husband left, I met a girlfriend for lunch on my birthday, and she was someone I’d always thought had one of the best relationships of anyone I knew. This was a couple who had never stopped laughing at one another’s jokes, who still held hands like teenagers into their 50s. She confided that her husband had given her only a handful of gifts in all their years together; he just didn’t see the point of them. I wondered whether my marriage might have lived a little longer if we had let ourselves off the hook in this way and focused on laughter, rather than maintaining our dutiful cycle of exchange.
Leaving can be its own kind of gift, and I could tell it had cost him a great deal, not least the fact that we were no longer living as a unit with the children we both adored. He wrote to say how difficult the decision had been because I had given him so much.
After my tears dried, it was clear that his absence had given me something as well: a new life in which I could explore sides of myself that couldn’t have been expressed together with him, much as I loved and missed him. The freedom to become a fuller version of yourself is the greatest gift any human being can give to another. I finally got the dancing I had been asking for all these years, even if it wasn’t with him, and the sociable dinners I yearned for, even if he wasn’t at the table. My cooking became more interesting without him saying it didn’t matter much whether I used tarragon or parsley.
I started growing roses, now that I was no longer living with someone who couldn’t have them in the house. When we met for an awkward cup of coffee to discuss the children, I told him about my newfound interest in roses and said, half joking and half not, that he had given me the gift of flowers.
