Here's What Your Christmas Present from Your Partner Says About Your Relationship

Christmas is a romantic time. You go to Winter Wonderland and queue with your partner for 25 minutes for a £4 Nutella and banana crepe, which some cunt in a grey fur gilet knocks into a puddle. Your house is so cold, sex feels like rubbing two frozen chicken wings together. You go home to your respective family homes and send them videos of your mum pissed on Bailey’s, rolling her hips to Club Tropicana, and your pervy uncle Steve who won’t stop saying "what lovely breasts" every time Holly Willoughby appears in her low cut M&S dress! Christmas!

You will also get a lot of shit presents from loved ones over Christmas. Aunt Linda gets you an iTunes voucher you never use, because who actually knows their Apple ID? Dad gets you an unfunny expensive hardback coffee table book called Every Type of Poo. Against all recommendations, mum still goes on right ahead and buys you clothes – maybe it’s some Jack Wills boxers, maybe it’s an All Saints dark grey v-neck, or possibly a Dorothy Perkins nylon pink peplum top – which she hands to you with half an apology. "It's not much," she says, "but I did have to bail you out of that gas bill, didn't I, love?"

But what did you expect? Your parents haven't known who you are since you went vegan and stopped finding Michael McIntyre funny. But your partner? They're supposed to get you something actually good. Shame you both definitely won't manage it. Here's what that utterly disappointing present from your boyfriend or girlfriend says about your relationship:

You don't actually like your partner. You just need someone to accompany you to the herbal gin tasting at The Shard, someone to sit with in an igloo-shaped pod while you #wintertime on Instagram, someone to try the authentic Serrano ham you read about in Time Out, to go to the gothic yoga class, the Clapham grime bingo, the safari-themed silent rave where you pretend to ironically like Mr Brightside (you actually think it's a solid piece of songwriting).

Your partner exists because you can't bear to be alone. Your greatest fear is hearing those voices that seep into your brain late at night, laughing at how you pay for a WeWork space but do nothing but answer emails; at how you think putting ghee in your coffee makes you more productive; at how you call yourself a "creative". Being with someone is worth it, if only to silence the self-hatred.

The end comes after a planned trip to a little Airbnb in the Welsh valleys. With nothing to do but climb those green hills, you realise you severely dislike each other. Alone in the cold breeze with not even an independent cinema to hide in, you must accept: it is over.

You know each other, do you? You care for each other's opinions? You make me sick. You go to parties just to make out in the corner, using so much tongue you make a schmuk-schmuk sound like you’re whisking pancake batter. In festival crowds, one forms a protective shield around the other as though they’re so delicate a bit of shoving might dissolve their bones. When you answer the phone to them your voice changes like you're talking to a cat: "Oh hey, my little fruit parcel."

You'll never break up. Instead, you'll get so lost within each other's arseholes – your post-relationship lack of friends meaning no one will come to prise you out of the intestinal wall you're lodged in – that you will simply suffocate inside each other.

Your boyfriend is basically Jameela Jamil, but instead of posting selfies with a copy of We Should All Be Feminists and gassing about weight loss tea and Photoshop, he's ranting about capitalism. Largely, he's not wrong, but do I need to know that the Foxes Ginger Nut I'm eating is a product of surplus labour value? It’s his fault you are – quietly, internally – becoming a raging Tory.

How long before you tell them you just want to be face down in a pillow when you’re banging? You love a bit of lazy missionary. That monotonous slapping of skin is basically all you need (maybe, at a push, also someone to occasionally say, "Yeah, like that"). BDSM or S&M is something you pretended to be into to compensate for your lack of personality. Do you remember that time they stuffed a sock they'd been wearing all day into your mouth and you didn't say no because the lie has gone on too long? Intimacy with them feels like a bushtucker trial on I’m A Celebrity.

I bet you can't wait for Christmas Day, when she'll want to try all these presents out! Fingers crossed she doesn’t buy a remote control cock ring and persuade you to put it on under the table again.

Will convince you it's OK that he's always got girls in harem pants sitting on his knee. You leave him when you realise monogamy is indeed a construct, one you feel quite comfortable taking part in. Spotting the pube of the other girl he's sleeping with resting on the toilet bowl was the last straw.

Your girlfriend's dad is terrifying. He's rich because he did plumbing work on Harry Kane’s toilet, and he’s always threatening to cut your dick off, mush it up in a food processor and feed it to you through a beer bong if you dare hurt little Sasha. Funny, because between mouthfuls of gammon and chips, Mike's regularly calling his wife "a silly tart". You love your girlfriend, though. She’s worth it. You sit and wait for her on that big bench outside the Topshop changing rooms. You take pictures of her in her burgundy velour Miss Pap tracksuit next to your neighbour's white Jeep. She always smells of Thierry Mugler Alien.

She dumps you to get into the Love Island villa, so you sell a story to the Daily Mail. The headline runs: "Dumped Estate Agent Breaks His Silence on Sasha McCoy and Claims 'She Wants Fame'". You wake up one night. Mike is banging at your door. He looks angry.

You met in halls. Your boyfriend is the sort of guy who loves Russell Howard’s jokes about jizzing. You break up when you move to London and he stays in your uni town, trying to get freshers to listen to that story about the time Tommo was shitting and throwing up at the same time.

Wow! You really are that shit! Luckily, your partner is just as clueless as you, so they'll think a powdery, sweet-smelling rock is a good present too. You both started driving aged 16 and passed the test immediately. You're upset Friends has been taken off Netflix, and the best night of your lives was when you went to Olly Murs' Never Been Better tour. You took Travel and Tourism as a GCSE, even though Thomas Cook would definitely have let you holiday rep without that "qualification". You always post pictures of the food he makes you – despite it always being a dried-out roast chicken, soggy carrots and some Aunt Bessie Yorkshire puddings – captioned #boydonegood. You will never break up. This is not something to celebrate.

You've been together for long enough now that watching a sex scene makes you both squirm internally because you're equally aware you haven't fucked for months. The anal beads are buried under bank statements, gathering a light film of dust. You argue when she uses some of your Berry Pie vape juice or takes your special tupperware to work. You stay together for the halved rent.

Your boyfriend is incapable. He can’t even make mashed potato without checking a BBC Good Food recipe. He laughed at that YouTube video of a guy squirting water on strangers who thought they were being acid-attacked. He thinks putting paprika on chicken makes him Marco Pierre White and constantly recommends it to people. You buy him a Christmas present to try help him mature. He continues to Dutch Oven you until you leave him for a 55-year-old CEO sugar daddy you found on Seeking Arrangement.

Your boyfriend is always showing you Lad Bible videos of men racing down suburban streets in shopping trolleys, or soldiers being greeted by their dogs after coming back from Iraq. He’s gagging to go viral, so buys you a puppy in order to film a reaction video.

Honestly, you just wanted some Fenty underwear and a Lime Crime palette. You leave him and the dog. He becomes one of those confusingly stacked men you see walking ultra femme animals in the park.

You met them when Obey was cool. They had so much branded clothing on they looked like a motorway sign. You spend your evenings trying to contextualise and then legitimise the crimes of various SoundCloud rappers: "His music is so dark, it’s clear he was in a bad place"; "Bowie slept with young women too"; "You can separate the art from the person". You take pictures of each other on public transport with the Hugi app and you back each other when you get into arguments on The Basement Facebook group.

Sadly, you never have sex because your mum says they have to sleep in the spare room when they come over. After three months you catch them Snapchatting their new Yeezys to someone called Pippa or Annabel, and that’s when you know it's over. You block him on all social media and write a long post with the sign off "thank u, next".

When you got together she liked that you were a bartender. She liked that you gave her mates lines of coke at the pub on a Thursday. She liked taking your Champion T-shirts and sending you pictures of her wearing both them and thick white sport socks covered in weed leaves.

But lately, that guy she goes to protests with – you know, Raphael; the one who wears a little mustard yellow hat, black turtlenecks and Dr Martens – he's coming around a lot. You can’t watch Match of the Day because here talking about municipalism. She buys you a Gramsci book, but the last thing you read was the Alex Rider series. After two weeks she's off Interrailing with Captain Douche around eastern Europe, to join some comrades in the revolution, which – regrettably – will not involve you.

If you got the Christmas gift wrong, you would have to endure three hours of, "But I just don’t get what was going through your mind?" So you nail it, not out of love but fear. Your girlfriend is always wearing white Stan Smiths, grey cashmere and a look that says, "I studied fashion merchandising and now I think I can shout at Pret staff for giving me soy milk instead of oat milk." At some point she will dump you and move to Paris.

@annielord8