On one of my first dates with my now husband, he ran out of dog food for his dog and ordered her a hamburger. As the dog wolfed it down in three seconds, alarm bells went off in my head.
What kind of person would order a hamburger from an upscale bistro for their dog? I was getting an early premonition of his extravagance, but for some reason it didn’t really bother me.
When you really like someone, these sorts of red flags, if you notice them at all, can seem almost festive. As Laura Kipnis memorably wrote, “The same things that make the person exciting and attractive, an object of your lust, will eventually become the things you wish to chop out of them with a steak knife.”
My husband is one of those people who will order three dishes at a restaurant, or anything with lobster, or an item with the ominous initials “mp” (market price) next to it. He will need very expensive socks. He will shop for an 8-foot aquarium for two sharks and an albino eel. He will buy the most expensive, cutting-edge drone, which he will use exactly twice.
I think the psychology behind this is that he feels cared for or loved or comforted by expensive things. They give him some feeling of well-being, of the universe nurturing him, which is probably less about money than about his childhood.
I, on the other hand, am frugal. I like tracking down a dress I want on a used-clothing website. I don’t find it relaxing to open a menu with $45 entrees; I don’t get pleasure out of a splurge at an expensive store. Once, early on, my husband gave me a pair of gray suede stiletto boots that cost about as much as my monthly mortgage payment, and I felt kind of sick, even as I appreciated their beauty.
My father grew up in the Depression and seems to have imprinted some of his aversion to expensive or wasteful things on me. He used to see his patients while wearing beautiful suits he found in thrift stores, which my mother called “his dead person’s clothes.”
Like many extravagant people, my husband is a seize-the-day type, a hedonist, an impulse follower. I am more careful, more anxious. In one of her novels, my mother wrote about a character on an idyllic afternoon at the beach scanning the horizon for sharks, and unfortunately I am that character. It feels to me that we are always one expensive pair of socks away from total financial ruin.
In this kind of mixed marriage, the frugal person is in an unglamorous position. They are probably right, but they are drab, boring, lacking in joie de vivre. They are sensible, puritanical.
The extravagant person, on the other hand, is fun, exciting, energizing. They are expansive, generous, charismatically reckless. Until of course they run out of money, but that’s another story.
One solution we came to very early on: totally separate bank accounts. That way the frugal person does not panic that they are losing control, and the extravagant person doesn’t feel nagged to death.
This one small thing is the key to sanity. Ideally, you don’t want your spouse to feel that they live in an orphanage and you are the one forcing them to eat gruel and wear rags. By keeping your finances totally separate, everyone can follow their own spending habits in peace. This works less well if you have kids in common, which we don’t.
I think my husband occasionally white lies to me about how much something costs, which is OK with me. One has to find ways to get along. He also teases me when he buys some outlandish steak or ridiculously upscale stapler, “It’s only a thousand dollars.” We have turned this point of conflict between us into a joke, which kind of works.
What else can you do with this clashing style of spending? I think the short answer is that you have to bicker with each other for a few years until you start rubbing off on each other.
One day I notice that he is suddenly buying things on sale and scouring the internet for deals. I also notice that I am actually allowing myself to enjoy an insane over-the-top bouquet of flowers he bought for me. There was not really room on our dining room table for anything but it and all its glory.
There are still moments where he thinks I am being too penny-pinching and I think he is being too spendthrifty, but secretly, without admitting it out loud, I think we have learned from each other.
He is starting to appreciate the thrill of a sale. I am starting to appreciate the joy of an impulse buy. I realize it can be fun to splash out on a nice dinner once in a while.
We have, inadvertently, without either of us sacrificing our feeling of superiority, edged closer together. Maybe this is a little like how people come to resemble their dogs.
At a certain point, in a marriage, you get locked into roles or caricatures. Sometimes I think, am I even frugal? And I am sure my husband thinks, am I even extravagant? We are probably both now somewhere in the vast, boring middle: sensible but with a dash of joie de vivre.
