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Things were going fine at the Wu household. Just fine. The stockings were hung like Peter North, the tree was as decorated as Colonel Sanders, and Uncle Larry bathed himself in marmalade as he had done for the past seventeen Christmases. Yes, everything was downright dandy in the Wu household until Christmas morning, when Danielle Wu sent shockwaves through the relationship community by gifting a new cellphone to her boyfriend, Brandon.

“What the hell? That’s like $600!” said Brandon, a look of pure terror flooding across his face. “When did we make this jump? Are we engaged? I need time to ease into these big life changes. We overnight went from cute breakfast in bed gifts to shelling out half a grand for each other. Is she insane? We’ve only been dating for two years!”

Brandon was especially humiliated upon the reveal of his own gift to Danielle. Wrapped thoughtfully in beautiful tissue paper, the framed photo of the two of them at the beach was only $30, but the excellent presentation made it look to be worth at least $35. Brandon chose the photo because it shows off Danielle’s ample cleavage.

The only thing worse than the humiliation of his cheap gift was how often she kept mentioning it, thanking him over and over again as if she really loved it.

“Thank you again for having that photo done up,” said Danielle, either being sarcastic or naively unaware of the capabilities of cheap inkjet printers. “It really means a lot to me that you were thinking about us when you chose it.”

It wasn’t long before Brandon’s paranoia began getting the better of him. Perhaps it’s a cheap knockoff phone that’s actually filled with angry bees? Maybe she’s a kleptomaniac and steals all sorts of nice things. That wouldn’t be so bad. Perhaps she bought the phone used off Craigslist, and it’s filled with thousands of images of an elderly Korean man’s crooked penis. That would be neat.

“This sucks. Guilting her into having sex with me is off limits for at least a year,” said Brandon, looking earnestly distraught at this revelation. “It’s devastating, because that’s all I’ve really got. I hope she’s trolling me. I’m not sure if I can date someone who likes me this much. If she had done this back when phones were subsidized by the carriers, this wouldn’t have even been an issue, but right now I’m feeling like she just put a gun to my head and proposed to me.”

Distraught with seemingly no way out of this bad situation, Brandon turned to the saddest and most pathetic of options.

“Hey Siri,” said Brandon, with a tone of quiet desperation that his new phone’s operating system had no way of detecting. “Find me an expensive designer handbag store open Christmas morning.”

The phone found zero results.

Most concerning about this faux pas is the destruction it’s done to the entire relationship gifts ecosystem. Birthday gifts are now the wild west. Should he roll the dice again, going less pricey and more personal, or start selling his plasma and raw semen in order to afford to hire Wiz Khalifa to rap in their driveway?

“What if she ignores the standard birthday gifts of boozy dinners and enthusiastic blowjobs and buys me a PS4 instead?” said Brandon. “What a nightmare! That shit’s like $350. If she goes full Playstation, I might not have any choice but to actually marry her. I wasn’t planning to do that for at least four more years, but I have absolutely no idea what else to buy her that would make up for a phone and a gaming system. She’s slam dunking every goddamn gift. I hate her so much.”

As of this article’s printing, Brandon was feverishly researching escape routes to Mexico using the “private mode” of his internet browser. Typing “do you have to tell them your name when you cross the Mexican border” brought up unfavorable results, so he turned his interest to ship boat captains willing to harbor stowaways in exchange for discreet sexual favors.

“Well, I guess there’s nothing left to do but fake my own death,” said Brandon, fumbling his way toward fashioning a garden hose into a noose. “Maybe if I leave a suicide note that’s a collection of cryptic clues she has to follow, I can get a good three or four day head start before she realizes I’m not dead. If I can pull that off, all the humiliation will remain back here. For I will no longer be Brandon. By then I’ll be Mookie Funshine, a hot-headed yet lovable ladyboy brothel owner in Thailand. It’s the only place she won’t look. She loves me too much. She bought me a $600 phone, for Christ’s sake.”