Ever since we announced our engagement, we have received a barrage of requests for links to a gift registry. All of these came from my side of the equation, where it's pretty much par for the course for extended family and family friends to buy gifts or give money to the couple at the announcement of an engagement. Now that the wedding is approaching ever so steadily, those requests have become something more akin to demands.

These days, it's pretty common to encounter a Wishing Well, which is in essence a pool of money that guests can contribute towards that pays for something significant, such as honeymoons and renovations. This means that rather than use a gift registry, you can just pop some money into the Wishing Well with the expectation that it'll get put towards something the couple wants.

I've become privy to a broad spectrum of opinions on wedding gifts. Some people refuse to give cash because it can feel too impersonal, too much like you're just paying the bride/groom for your dinner, or too tacky. Some people refuse to give gifts because it's not about what you give, it's about how the couple use the gift, and therefore cash is a better and more sensible option. I have lost track of how many times I've heard the discussion around how couples these days have been living together for a period of time prior to getting married, therefore they don't need all the "setting up the new home" items that were more common gifts for couples back in the day. Or how gifts are just this massive storage problem for a period after the wedding. Or how the excitement of opening a wrapped present is such a wonderful feeling. Or the environmentally unfriendly wastage of wrapping paper.

It all makes sense from both sides, it really does. I have no strong opinion on one side or the other; often, it'll come down to how well I know the couple and whether or not they do in fact have a registry. If there is one, I'll buy something off it. If there isn't, we give cash.

Out of respect to our friends and family who had requested one, Blake and I made an attempt to set up an online gift registry. We failed within 10 minutes of starting.

Our problem, we realised, is that we are extremely particular people. When I say I want a vacuum cleaner, for example, I don't just mean "get me anything from this brand". I will research the shit out of it and other brands, look for the most neutral reviews I can find, compare those to old models or other brands, create a shortlist of possibilities, evaluate those based on what I want in a vacuum cleaner, and then source the best price for that model. (For the record, don't get me a vacuum cleaner.)

We have found no (free) online registry that supplied or offered to supply every possible product we wanted at reasonable prices. On top of that, it was impossible for us to know how much was too much or too little to ask. Is it reasonable to ask for a [thing] costing $[number]?

In essence, those 10 minutes consisted of me finding a number of online gift registries, us staring blankly at each other for what we would even add to it in the first place, and then when an idea did eventually come to us, I went off and did my research. By the time I came back with a shortlist for that one item (at about the 10-minute mark), I realised that it just wasn't going to work. There is no registry that I'd found that offers the best model/version of everything, and we're too picky to settle.

I have to reiterate that we wouldn't have even bothered with trying if it weren't for all the requests we were getting, mostly from family friends I've known my whole life. I mean, another reason for us not knowing how to do a gift list was because we didn't really expect gifts!

In the end, it just seemed easier to field individual requests from the more In. Sis. Tent. folks out there and just direct everyone else who'd like to get us something to the Wishing Well. As it is, it's pretty common in Chinese weddings for people to give cash, so if you really want to get us a gift but are feeling a bit iffy about just dropping dollars, you can always just say you're being culturally appropriate!