"Fake jewelry is for children and costumes" – my grandmother

So... I'm not sure about the category, but since it's essentially about decluttering I put it in "home improvement". Please feel free to change it, if it doesn't fit there, mods.

After re-reading the Marie Kondo books (absolutely recommend them if someone hasn’t read them yet) I have taken on the task of sorting through and decluttering my jewelry. I expected a trip down memory lane because I basically haven’t thrown any of it away since I was a teenager (I’m in my 30s now), but I was still surprised how telling old jewelry gifts are about the person who gave them to me.

During all of it I remembered something my grandmother once said to me that really upset me at the time. Teenage (maybe 16-year-old) me proudly showed her a necklace my then-boyfriend (19… don’t ask) had given me for my birthday. Obviously very kitschy, supercheap fake stuff that may have cost him 15 bucks, if even that. My grandmother looked at it, scoffed and said the following words that sounded so superficial and mean to me at the time:

“Fake jewelry is for children and costumes. You are worth so much more than that.”

She was absolutely right of course. The guy turned out to be a creepy loser who only used me and then cheated and broke my heart. That thing was obviously the first item I threw out today.

As I continue to sort through it all it is always the same pattern.

We didn’t have a lot of money growing up but my father wouldn’t have been caught dead giving my mother, me or my sister fake jewelry. It was always real gold or at least silver (not gold or silver plated) and real stones and matched our taste and style, even if he had to save money all year and the items themselves were small. I still treasure and wear every single piece he gave me.

My heirloom jewelry from my grandparents and grandaunts carries so many memories and even if I don’t wear some pieces now because they don’t match my current style, I will love to give them to a new generation someday.

The man I still consider my only HV ex gave me beautiful white gold and pearl earrings I still love to wear, even though we were both poor college students.

Then there are the men who gave me stuff that was real and probably expensive but that didn’t match my style at all. One look at me would tell you that I’d never wear that. And it turns out that they were the same people who also never really listened to anything else I had to say in our relationship or didn’t take it seriously. The ones who would use those expensive gifts to brag in front of strangers (“Honey show them the bracelet I gave you! Can you guess how much it cost?” “Have you told your mother about the earrings I gave you?”) and would pout if I didn’t wear it every day or use it as an argument in fights “How can you complain about something that small if I give you such expensive gifts!”

Every man who gave me fake jewelry has also turned out to be LV sooner or later.

And if you look at how little a small, nice piece can cost there is simply no excuse. Let’s say someone saves $10 a month to buy you a birthday gift. That should be doable even for a student. If you can’t save up $10 a month for gifts you have other problems than dating and should prioritize them. That’s $120 after a year. $120 buy you a nice, real gold necklace or pair of earrings. Nothing huge or diamond studded, but at least something real and durable. If I search for real gold items in that price range on the website of a random online jewelry shop I get over 400 hits. Hey, even a nice pair of white gold and sweetwater pearl studs. There’s literally no excuse other than them being lazy, thoughtless and cheap.

Take my grandmother’s advice, sisters:

“Fake jewelry is for children and costumes. You are worth so much more than that.”