the ex's gifts dilemma

so i heard this debate over the years and it was recently reraised during a wine party a week or two ago. the question is, "what do you do with gifts your previous ex's have given you?"

so the stories follow almost stereotypical lines.

• a guy is dating a girl and only after a while the girl finds out that some or all of the half way decent things the guy owns was bought by an ex. a good example would be nice wardrobe, let's say it turns out that it was an ex that dragged his sorry ass to the mall and swapped out all his crap clothes for something respectable.

• as the new girlfriend does it bother you that all his stuff was bought by an ex? do you take him to the mall and make him get new stuff? i think most people would be ok with it... who cares about clothes right? not i think it's a little different if the piece of clothing is something you think it is really cute. if the guy's favorite pair of jeans makes him look super hot... do you get annoyed that it was an ex that did that? she probably thought it was super hot too.
  

• of course this goes both ways... it's almost cliche that a girl might have a favorite sweater or shirt she wears at home to lounge about that's oversized because it was her ex's. and now it's the guy whose annoyed. what do you do?

common strategies:

• you don't tell them what they don't need to know. i mean who needs to know where stuff came from right? the past is the past. of course that's how we approach our stuff, but if we find out that someone else's stuff came from an ex, it's a violation of trust. it seems like this tactic (which is used by both genders of course) tends to apply most to women and jewelry. you get a nice piece of jewelry, you're not going to just stop wearing it... cartier is cartier dammit it and no guy is going to stop it from being a nice thing to wear. fair enough, but isn't that a bit of a double standard?

• that leads to strategy 2: lie, lie, lie. eventually people get curious and start asking nosing questions and you can't fight them off forever right? you have to give them an answer. and this is were parents, siblings and close cousins who you never spoke of come into the picture right? "oh my sister bought me those jeans." "my dad bought me this for my birthday." i mean who is so insensitive to argue with that. it's not like people are going to do fact-checking... unless they're crazy. but then again, building trust with lies is not the world's best idea right?
  

• which leaves the last strategy: telling the truth. i think someone said that if you have to tell the truth you are either boring or naive. clearly the guy is one cynical dood. of course the pros are that you come clean and figure it out, all good on paper and for trust building, blah blah blah. the con: you could lose a lot of your stuff. and that kinda doesn't seem fair right?

so what to do? as with many things in life i learn all my life lessons from television. the show, how i met your mother, has an entire episode about this very topic. Second 2, episode 16.

[via cbs - how i met your mother]