Illustrated portrait of Mara Ellison in the Gifts for Couples palette

Writer at Gifts for Couples

Mara Ellison

Couples gifting editor

About Mara

Mara spent nine years helping couples build wedding registries, which is an unusually useful seat for this subject: you watch what guests actually buy, and months later you hear which of it survived. The pattern was consistent, and it is basically what this site is about — the gifts couples still use are rarely the ones that photographed best on the day.

She started Gifts for Couples for the guests rather than the couple. Guests get the hardest version of the problem and the least information: two people, one budget, an unfamiliar home, and often nothing to go on but a registry that has already been picked clean.

She is not a wedding planner and holds no certification in event or gift planning. She writes buying guides, answers reader mail herself, and corrects the site when somebody tells her it is wrong.

How Mara works

  • Name the half it is for

    Every pick gets labeled: one of them, the two of them, or the room they share. A gift for one person is still a good gift — it just is not a couples gift, and the guide says so.

  • Start from the occasion

    A wedding, an engagement, a housewarming and a twenty-fifth anniversary have different rules about price, privacy and who is watching it get opened. The occasion comes before the product.

  • No tests we did not run

    We explain how to choose. We do not claim to have lived with a product, and we never publish a price, rating or review count we cannot source.

Articles by Mara

Contact

Spotted an error, or have a question or suggestion about a guide? Write to pablobravo44@gmail.com or use the contact page.