A recent AP story summarizes the findings of a team of mathematicians who studied and then modeled human courtship behaviors. In the model, a man would give either a “worthless,” “valuable,” or “extravagant” gift to a woman, and then their reactions were scored. The value of the valuable gift, items like diamonds and appliances, is primarily monetary. The extravagant gift isn’t necessarily expensive, rather its value is in the experience. Examples the story gave were “dinner at a fancy restaurant, tickets to a Broadway show or a moonlit serenade.” The worthless gift seemed to be something of no positive value either monetary or experiential. Something like … I don’t know … maybe a set of napkin rings.

What they found was that the extravagant gifts scored highest for both men and women. The mathematicians’ interpretation was that the extravagant gift signals to women that “they have found a strong and committed mate,” while men are reassured that they have “avoid[ed a] gold-digger by giving only gifts that have no intrinsic value.” All in all, a pretty grim interpretation of courtship both for its reductive set of human values and the curiously gendered interpretation.

But I’d been thinking about gifts before reading about this study, mainly because so many of my friends and family have summer birthdays. When the time comes to give and receive, I’m often haunted by the unhappy lesson of an undergraduate anthropology class – that gift-giving is an act of aggression. I certainly see what they mean, how gifts can indicate status, how they can incite expectations of reciprocation. With this in the back of my mind, it makes what’s an already fairly fraught exchange a bit worse.

A friend and I had been talking, on my birthday, about gifts. I told her that I was hoping my sweetie would figure out the one little thing I wanted (something that would fall into the mathematician’s extravagant category), and figure it out without a hint. Not at all fair – I know. But there was something (narcissistic?) about the gift-giver knowing me so well as to divine my untold desires that would’ve been a gift in itself. Then we started talking about cut flowers (hint!) and she suggested that the best gifts were excessive, something you might want but wouldn’t necessarily get for yourself.

I don’t know whether thinking of gifts as excessive takes away or reduces the aggression that may be implicit in gift-giving, or whether it allows us to downplay the computational scenario where “accepts gift with no intrinsic value” equals “not a gold-digger.” But, if it does … well, happier birthdays.