Men put off Mother’s Day shopping out of fear, not laziness: psychologist
Posted May 9, 2014 6:44 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – It’s almost as much of a certainty as death and taxes: men will wait until the very last minute to shop. And you can bet that will be the case with Mother’s Day this weekend.
But there may be a good reason.
It’s not necessarily laziness that keeps men leaving their Mother’s Day shopping to the last minute. Dr. Tim Pychyl, a psychology professor at Carleton University says forced holidays create a lot of stress for men.
“The question becomes ‘What am I going to get? How am I going to show all this love, devotion, and care?’ The expectations are high, and when we try to live up to unrealistically high expectations, we’re likely to procrastinate,” he explains.
Pychyl says men tend not to want to ask their moms or wives what they would like because that creates another issue. He says it leads to the question of “Don’t you know what I want?”
He adds this could suggest a lack of awareness and intimacy in their relationship.
“We procrastinate when we don’t know what to do. It’s not necessarily some moral failure, but the fact that sometimes when we have these really high expectations for ourselves, we get frozen at the beginning, thinking ‘I can’t live up to that.'”
Pychyl’s suggestion is to just start shopping as early as possible to help get over the fear of getting the perfect gift.
