DadTalk

Why do men give such bad presents?

Barack Obama may claim to give good Christmas presents, but he's the exception to the rule, says Celia Walden in the Telegraph.

How many men in life are able not only to notice but to log your likes and dislikes? My closest male friends and family would, even under duress, be incapable of remembering what kind of shoes I wear or which face creams and perfumes I use. I still get given chocolates (despite having last ingested one in May 1982) and flowers (despite it being common knowledge that they cause me more anxiety than pleasure).

But to men, I suspect, the minutiae of female materialistic desire is so complex as to be indecipherable - better, then, to abstain altogether and go for something either prosaic or left field.

Only the latter, I reason, can explain the dog-eared Agatha Christie books my older brother took off the sitting-room shelf when I was 14, wrapped, and offered me on Christmas Day. I thanked him - and put them straight back on the shelf. A few years later, as my middle brother cooed over the expensive first edition of Groucho Marx's letters that I had painstakingly tracked down on Amazon for him, I pulled a wicker waste-paper basket out of a crumpled Habitat bag - and then the £7.99 receipt.

"The point of being a grown-up man," explains a colleague, "is that if you want something, you just go and buy it. Christmas, for us, becomes a frivolous notional exchange. For women, on the other hand, it's an opportunity to get something they've coveted for a long time."

So if men - bar Obama, seemingly the exception to every rule - are hopeless present givers, we are avid opportunists. Which leaves women with two alternatives: either train yourself to expect nothing at all, or learn to fake smile with your eyes. Honestly, no really - seriously - it makes all the difference.

Read more on this from the Telegraph