I had a mini-epiphany this morning. After 43 years, for the first time I understand how an article of clothing can be a gift. This obscure realization comes by way of the not-so-obscure truism that you don't really appreciate something until it has been taken away. (That will mean more to those of you who know the background. For the rest of you, it can't be helped: To whatever extent my personal life does not belong to me alone it won't be discussed here.)

Like all little boys, I always thought of clothing as a non-gift. Like, "Oh, a sweater ... Did I get any real gifts?" You see humorous jibes about this in comics all the time, but parents and grandparents and aunts persist anyway.

As I became an adult, my interest in collecting presents withered to almost nothing, and my interest in clothes never grew beyond rudimentary functionality. (As a young adult I had plenty of other personal qualities that would set off false positives in poorly tuned gaydars, but any sense of sartorial aesthetics was never among them.)

As for gifts, even as a teen I had begun the drift toward the masculine-pragmatist view that if you get an urge to give a gift you should just give it and not wait for a holiday, and if you don't have an urge you should not give anything. Every gift creates its own occasion, and no occasion should ever have to go looking for a gift to fill it. Holiday gift giving is just an enormous institutionalized market failure. Where the gift is something the recipient wouldn't buy for himself, it's a misallocation of resources; where it is, it would be more practical to cut out the middle man.

Throughout my bachelor years I lived that philosophy as far as I was able, happily ignoring Christmas and birthdays, but eventually I became married and domesticated. In the larger scheme of marital compromise, going along with the gift-giving racket is just once concession, and not one of the larger ones. In my ideal marital world, the entire business of exchanging gifts will be assigned as women's work. Just as my wife never has to take out the trash, "we" should give all our gifts without me having to do anything more than sign cards and share in the price tags.

I'm straying from my point. It seems obvious now, but I guess I never put the pieces together. What I realized today is that when a woman gives you an article of clothing and calls it a present, the implicit message is not just "I want you to wear this" but also "so now you can finally throw away that ugly one that you always wore before". Generally she won't say the second part out loud, though sometimes you can guess it. Hearing it said aloud last week helped me to see the third implicit message behind that, which is, "How you look is a reflection on me, because I have claimed you as my own."

When a woman gives you a gift of clothing, she is marking her territory. That's the gift. I get that now.

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