When a peer-reviewed research paper opens with a quotation from Dante's Inferno, you know you're in for some interesting reading. "Fatal (Fiscal) Attraction: Spendthrifts and Tightwads in Marriage," published in the Social Science Research Network, begins with the following exchange between The Hoarders and The Wasters, who forever argue in the Fourth Circle of Hell:
They strained their chests against enormous weights, and with mad howls rolled them at one another. Then in haste they rolled them back, one party shouting out: “Why do you hoard?” and the other: “Why do you waste?
To some readers, this scene probably gets played out every time they go over their credit card statements with their spouses. Why is it so often the case one spouse in a marriage is a tightwad/hoarder and the other is a spendthrift/waster?
The paper, written by researchers at The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and Northwestern University seeks to answer that question by examining "whether feelings toward spending money predict whom people marry, as well as whether and why husband/wife differences in feelings toward spending money influence marital well-being."
The conclusions are rather dismal. The found that people who aren't married think they'd be happier with a spouse who shares their attitude towards spending. The researchers also found that this belief is generally true — pairs of spendthrifts and pairs of misers tend to have happier marriages than ones in which one partner is a spendthrift and the other is a miser.
Unfortunately, they found that "people tend to be attracted to mates with opposing emotional reactions toward spending," because spendthrifts usually don't like their own emotional reaction about spending so they seek a mate who is a tightwad, and vice versa. These mixed marriages, say the researchers, "appear to make tightwads and spendthrifts about as happy as the Hoarders and Wasters in Dante’s Inferno."
What can you do about it if you're in a mixed marriage? My advice: Convert to the other side, if you can stomach it. Or at least work with your partner to find a happy medium.
(Via Priceless, by William Poundstone)
Mark Frauenfelder – Editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular Boing Boing weblog, Mark was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and is the founding editor of Wired Online.