I admit, I feel conflicted about my wedding gift registry. I feel a bit entitled saying “Here’s what I like, now go buy it for me!” But at the same time, my loved ones know of my minimalist proclivities, and I know that makes me very hard to shop for. I want to make shopping for a wedding gift as simple as possible.
I’m convinced by Gary Chapman’s argument that gift giving is a “love language,” and I don’t think we have to condemn the whole practice of gift giving because of its more crass and commercial extremes. Nor do we have to condemn the practice of the gift registry.
People want to give us wedding gifts as a sign of care and celebration, so instead of refusing this generous impulse, we can participate in a way that results in us getting things we’ll love and takes the onus off of our loved ones to think of something that would fit in our house AND suit our tastes AND match our decor AND pass our high standards for living in our home.
Some people feel more comfortable with giving a physical gift than with giving a check or contributing to a travel fund, and I’m not here to insist they make themselves uncomfortable or think of their own item to give us.
We made our registry a few weeks before it actually went live for our guests to view, and in that time it became something akin to my shopping list. We’d tweak the items, the quantities, and often delete an item altogether, realizing we had happily gone without it and wouldn’t benefit much from acquiring it.
We had to be wary of gear, because owning something does not automatically mean we’ll actually use that thing. I don’t need to ask folks for a dozen ramekins for the zero times I make crème brûlée. Also, everything had to pass the corkscrew test. (Hyper-specific kitchen gear are among the most common wedding gifts that clients part with during the purge stage of S.P.A.C.E.)
We could have asked for “upgrades” to items we already own, but we took great care to select and curate the things in our home and as such, we don’t particularly want to replace our possessions simply because we happen to be picking up a marriage certificate.
And so, our wedding registry exists, and it has a mix of experiential, physical, and group funded gifts. The upgrades we did register for include items that are easily recycled or donated, like towels. (See you in July, BARCS.) The gear we’ve asked for represents solutions to problems we’ve identified in advance, e.g. the need for higher-capacity blender for our smoothie habit.
It was important to interrogate the aspirations behind each item: do we want this thing only because it’s shiny and pretty and high-end? Or would this thing support the life that we’re trying to live?
Which is the same question I regularly ask of all my possessions.