Well, I believe that all the watches that are real keepers do have a strong stories behind them.
Here is mine:
When my great grand father celebrated his golden anniversary in the 70s, he gifted a Patek 2573j to each of his two sons. A while later, those two brothers became estranged for various reasons. One of them was my grand father: after he passed away, his barely touched piece was given to me by my father who does not care about watches at all. I was obviously very happy about this but the watch did not have such a strong sentimental value as I had never seen my grand father wearing it and we did not have such a strong connection.
On the other hand, my grand uncle had a warmer personality and we got along very well. He was also profusely smoking and wearing his Patek on a daily basis for decades. When he became too old to wind his watch (small crown) or to read its dial (thin gold hands), he had it serviced, put on a new strap on it and gave it to me. He did not make a big fuss about it but we both knew how fond I was of watches and how touched I was by his gesture.
Here I was with two equal watches, probably close in production numbers too but one was NOS and the other one had a stained dial from tobacco smoke (turned dirty gold instead of silver), the crown was well worn too.
A few years later, as I was gathering funds to buy my home, I had to find a way to some additional cash. That is when I took the hard decision to sell one of my sentimental watches (family jewels and all). Can you guess which one went out of the door? It was a case of condition vs. sentimentality. The potential buyer of the watch being foreigner to this story, was only going to focus on condition.
The next steps to this story will be: