FOR Neil Fiore, it was the perfect Christmas gift for the lady who loved scented candles: a bright red fire extinguisher, wrapped in a white bow.

Perhaps, as a psychologist at Berkeley University in California, he should have been prepared for the muted wail of outrage. “But I wanted her to know I was practical and looking out for her safety. Sadly, the relationship did not survive long after that,” he confessed last week.

For Fiore, and millions like him, what should be the joy of giving has become a stressful maze of missed hints, guessing games and panic attacks that end in Christmas morning disappointment.

Now social scientists believe they can explain why men are such unsuccessful Christmas shoppers and what they can do about it.

Researchers at Tilburg University in Holland and the Katholieke University in Belgium quizzed 35 couples and found that most were better at buying presents for strangers than for their partners. Luk Warlop, one of the report’s authors, said: “When you know someone, then you think you know it all.”

The solution, according to the report published in the University of Chicago’s Journal of Consumer Research, is for women to depend less on hints and for men to ask more questions and to avoid overspending to compensate.

For men, the array of opportunities on the internet merely means more ways of getting it horribly wrong. Affluence has not helped: women can often buy everything obvious that they want for themselves.

Some desperate men employ £200-a-day “personal shoppers” who ask them to filch their wives’ or girlfriends’ clothing so they can get the correct sizes.

To reduce its annual mountain of returned underwear, Marks & Spencer recently trained 200 men in 50 stores to help male customers to choose Christmas lingerie.

Misguided gifts can crystallise underlying tensions. “I once bought a girlfriend a T-shirt with a picture of me on it and the words My Boyfriend,” said David Parker, 33, a project manager from Windsor. “She washed her car with it.”

Denise Knowles, a counsellor with Relate, said modern lifestyles were partly to blame: “We make assumptions about what our partner wants based on conversations we have had very early in the relationship. Buying the wrong present for your partner can be about complacency but it can also be because the couple don’t have the time to sit together and talk about what they like and enjoy.”

Additional reporting: Roger Waite

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