Gift giving: Do you find AS a help or a hinderance?

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I find that AS is quite useful when it comes to giving gifts it's like my observational skills allow me to match gifts to people in my head when I find things, like organizing CDs or things by colour. Does anyone else find this or does AS make gift giving difficult for you? -MaS

Better off for it, btw love your stitch punk!

I hate shopping. I find it stressful. I know my mom loves candles so I will always get her those and my dad something sporty. My brothers, I have no idea. I have no idea what movies they have. I just don't like doing it and would rather skip it. They used to be fun to shop for but now they are grown, they don't want toys.

i'm hfa, but it's pretty much the same thing apparently, and i think i might be AS or NT anyways.

but i find it hindering. sometimes i think it's all fine being on the spectrum but then something happens that just makes me realise how 'ret*d' i really am. like just the other day i was at a friends place for a little bbq social gathering and we were all sitting around and the others were talking and i just was not at all interested in the topic and i coud'nt pretend to be. and i started thinking about how lame it was that i couldn't enjoy a simple conversation and laugh like everyone else was, simply because my mind wont allow me to enjoy any topic i consider to be fickle. i'm sure not everyone there cared about the subject matter, but they found a way to enjoy it, i was just stuck feeling bored and out of place, and everyone can tell.

It could help if I cared. I don't care giving and reciving gift.

I don't like shopping for gifts. I find it difficult to know what someone would like as I don't tend to always be very observant in that sense.
But, I prefer giving to receiving. Receiving, you have to fake a smile even if you don't like what you have got, and it gets tiring to have to keep smiling each time you open a present, simply to ensure the other person doesn't assume you are ungrateful. Even if I love a gift, I find it very hard to naturally respond with excitement and smiles. I have to force it.

I never have any idea what to get for people. Sometimes I have little ideas, but then I'm not sure, 'cause I'm like well what if they don't like it, or already have it, or don't have the time to use it.. I think it's very much an issue of not being able to put myself in someone else's shoes. Like last year, when I was really depressed and didn't want anything because I was so hopeless, I couldn't think of anything at all. Now, I have some ideas, but then they start to seem more like things that I might like than that the person might like, and I get all unsure.

i can not determine how my autism affects my notions about giving gifts.

my girlfriend's mother is not enamored of me because she considers my gifts to tammy to be "unromantic". she is a very non autistic woman, and she says i am like a liizard in the way i look at people when i look at them. she thinks i think like a reptile and she is not impressed with anything i give to tammy.

on valentines day i should apparently send her roses and chocolates. none of those two gifts last for long. i can not imagine why "roses" are supposed to be "romantic".

they are just flowers and they should not have been picked anyway.

if i obeyed the rules and gave chocolates and roses for valentines day, and if i was thanked eagerly by tammy for those gifts, i would feel like a fraud for accepting her thanks because i would have only bought what her mother told me to buy.

i like to get her things like an LCD TV, or a barrista's professional coffee machine, or some long lasting appliance that i know she needs rather than stuff that is perishable.

her mother can not understand my reasoning (or lack of intuition for romance) and i can not understand her vice verce (to mine) perceptions either.
all tammy's valentines presents i ever gave her are still in her room and her house, and they are working well, but if those presents had have been chocolates and roses, then they would all have been excreted and dumped long ago and i do not like temporary gifts.

so maybe my AS is a hindrance on a normal level, but it may endear me to someone like me if ever i encounter them some day as well.

I rarely give gifts to anyone, but when I do it's usually spontaneous with no relation to any type of prescribed holiday. Giving gifts when you're required to give a gift just doesn't feel real to me.

It hinders and blocks me
First of all I hate to give gifts just because "I should" like at christmastime and such. It just gave anxiety running around the shopping area and fight with other stressy geeks to get to see what to potentially buy for a certain person (who might not like it anyway)
So the latest years we had said very strictly NO christmasgifts from our side!!

And now Im in fight with my mother via email because a couple of gifts for my birthday turned out in the wrong color
She is my complete opposite to me when it comes to gifts and apparently we cant meet in it

Sounds to me like her mother should pull the stick out of her butt..
Maybe she's annoyed because you give Tammy better gifts than she does?

But either way, what does a third-party opinion of the gift matter? The point of giving a gift is that the person you give it to likes it, not that their mother likes it..

I find the same thing. I buy my husband practical things, which is what I find romantic (or at least the closest thing to romantic I know). My husband gets me only practical things too. Other people however find it off-putting. I don't understand why you would want something temporary because it has been arbitrarily denoted as "sweet".

I am very grateful to people who tell me outright what they want because then I don't have to worry about messing it up.

That could easily be it. I want to march over to Tammy's parents house and grab Tammy's mother by the shoulders and tell her "stop being a jerk and a fool and stop raining on Tammy's parade, she's a very lucky girl and wiser parents could see that. He's putting a lot of thought and love into his choice of gifts. Can't you see that?"

(Don't worry b9. I have no intention of spending 3,000$ in airfare to actually do that. I wouldn't actually do that even if these people were my neighbors. But I've met people like Tammy's mother before and they just give me that impulse to shake them and talk some sense into them.)

Like Aurore said, the most romantic thing is to actually put some time into figuring out what the other person wants and can benefit from. I find that more romantic and thoughtful than doing something by reflex because it's what has been labeled romantic.

I actually like flowers as gifts. Not because they have the "romantic" label but because I like how they smell and how they look and how they make the house look a little bit more like a Spring day outside even if it's only temporary. And so my husband gets me flowers. This is not because they have the "romantic" label but because it's what I actually want for those reasons. A gift from the heart is one that shows you thought about the other person and didn't just grab something out of reflex. And the various posts here show that actually AS isn't a hinderance to that. (Except when it is because people feel paralyzed by the burden of getting the right thing. Oh well. But honestly, NT's who aren't shopaholics have a harder time with this than you think. I agonize over messing up on this too.)

I hate giving gifts, and I hate receiving them.

I can relate to this experience. On the topic of gift giving it's AWESOME! I know EXACTLY what people like and knock on wood there are ALWAYS Gift cards to major stores so you can buy what you want an item or groceries etc. to help you out. I always find something for someone usually months in advance LOL!

i dont know if it helps or hinders as ive never not had it.. but i m rubbish at choosing gifts for others. i ask people what they would like,i am better with children than aduults though but then i suppose they drop bigger hints. when people tell me what they would like. i am amazed and would never had chosen it .