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Money is a common source of conflict in marriage. Economic stressors such as insufficient income or mounting debt are often the culprit. However, above and beyond economic factors, differences in spouses’ spending habits can lead to arguments over money, and ultimately reduce marital satisfaction.
More often than not, birds of a feather flock together. We tend to marry people who, in a lot of ways, resemble ourselves. However, when we don’t like something about ourselves, we tend to avoid mates who also possess the undesired attribute. This qualification is important because my research with Cynthia Cryder and George Loewenstein suggests that many people spend differently than they would ideally like to spend. On the one hand, “tightwads” tend to spend less than they would ideally like to spend because they find spending money too painful. On the other hand, “spendthrifts” tend to spend more than they would ideally like to spend because they don’t find spending painful enough. Both tend to be more frustrated with their spending habits than “unconflicted consumers,” who spend about what they would like to spend.
In a series of studies published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Deborah Small, Eli Finkel, and I found that tightwads tend to marry spendthrifts on average, a rare instance in which opposites attract. Specifically, we found that the correlation between spouses’ responses to a “Tightwad-Spendthrift” scale was consistently and significantly negative across studies. One possible measurement concern is that spouses contrast themselves with each other (e.g., “well, I’m not as cheap as her”), and that this contrast effect is driving the negative correlation. However, we found the typical birds-of-a-feather pattern (also known as “positive assortment”) on other subjectively defined spending scales. For example, people who are highly price-conscious tend to marry people who are also highly price-conscious. The difference between the Tightwad-Spendthrift scale and the price consciousness scale is that people at the extremes of Tightwad-Spendthrift scale are frustrated with their location on the scale, whereas people at the extremes of the price consciousness scale are not frustrated.
The evidence thus far suggests that tightwads and spendthrifts tend to marry one another. But should they? Unfortunately, we found that the more spouses differed on the Tightwad-Spendthrift dimension, the more they fought over money, and the more dissatisfied they were with their marriage. This is consistent with a great deal of research documenting links between spousal dissimilarity and conflict. This pattern also held when controlling for financial outcomes, which were in the expected direction. For example, spendthrift/spendthrift couples were about 50% more likely than tightwad/tightwad couples to be in debt.
The results raise an interesting possibility. Tightwads may be better off financially and psychologically by marrying other tightwads. Spendthrifts, by contrast, face a more difficult choice: marrying a tightwad is likely to maximize financial well-being, but marrying another spendthrift may maximize psychological well-being.
Of course, drawing definitive conclusions about who should marry whom requires an experiment that would raise eyebrows at most IRBs: randomly assign spouses to one another. Spouses were not randomly selecting one another in our samples – indeed, tightwads and spendthrifts systematically married each other on average. Thus, without random assignment, one cannot rule out the possibility that people who select mates dissimilar to themselves are naturally more prone to be unhappy in marriage than people who select mates similar to themselves.
Nevertheless, the results suggest that people should be more cognizant of differences in spending habits before walking down the aisle. Irritations that arise from a partner’s spending habits before marriage are unlikely to dissipate after the honeymoon. Rather, as joint purchase and investment decisions become more frequent and impactful, differences in spending habits may take a toll on the marriage.
