How do two people plan a weekend together when one of them picks a hotel for the view and the other picks it for the price? A 2009 study led by Scott Rick of the University of Michigan suggests the question is a common one, because people who dislike their own spending habits tend to be drawn to partners with the opposite habits.

Spending Styles Within a Couple

Rick, working with Deborah Small and Eli Finkel, studied more than 1,000 adults across three studies and sorted them by their attitude to spending. People at both ends, the tightwads and the spendthrifts, were unhappy with their own habits, and the more dissatisfied they were, the more likely they were to be attracted to someone with the opposite approach. Rick has suggested that each type may want a partner who can correct the habit they dislike in themselves, a spender who hopes to be reined in or a saver who hopes to loosen up.

Married couples made up of one tightwad and one spendthrift turned out to be more common than couples whose habits matched. Those mixed couples also reported more conflict over money and lower satisfaction with the marriage, and the difference held after the researchers took income, debt and savings into account. When unmarried participants described their ideal partner, they said they wanted someone who shared their views on spending.

An earlier paper by Rick, Cynthia Cryder and George Loewenstein, published in 2008, built a short scale from four questions put to 13,327 respondents over 31 months. It describes tightwads as people who feel an anticipatory pain of paying and spend below their own ideal level, and spendthrifts as people who feel too little of that pain. Men in the sample leaned further towards the tightwad end than women. Younger respondents leaned towards the spendthrift end, and more education went with tighter habits.

Income Gaps in Australian Couples

The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, run by the Melbourne Institute, found that the share of couples in which the woman earns more than her partner rose from 22% to 25% over 17 years. Most of that growth came from couples whose incomes were already close. Using a stricter test, women earned at least 25% more than their partners in 20% of working-age opposite-sex couples in the 2017 wave of the survey, and that share rose to 32% in households where only the woman held a university degree.

A later analysis of the same data found that satisfaction with the relationship fell for both partners when the woman became the main earner, providing 60% or more of household income. The researchers linked part of that fall to women still doing most of the housework.

Couples at Different Stages of Life

A gap in taste between two partners can come from a gap in where each of them is in life. One may have settled routines, a home furnished over many years and a firm idea of how a Saturday should go, while the other is still working that out.

Second marriages, partners a decade apart in age and a sugar daddy relationship are all couples formed across that kind of gap. Each one depends on both people agreeing early on how their time together will be spent.

Shared Accounts and Marital Quality

In a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2023, Olson and colleagues, including Rick, Small and Finkel, studied how couples who merge finances fare. They randomly assigned 230 engaged or newlywed couples to open a joint bank account, to keep their money separate or to receive no instruction. Over the first two years of marriage, the couples with separate accounts and the no-instruction group showed the usual decline in relationship quality. The couples assigned a joint account kept their relationship quality steady. About 20% of the couples did not complete the study.

The couples who fully merged their money also reported a stronger sense of shared financial goals and were more likely to follow communal norms, in which partners give and receive without keeping score. Partial merging, with a joint account alongside separate ones, was not linked to the same benefit, although Finkel was cautious about that result. The researchers also noted that a fully shared account can give one partner control over the other’s money in a troubled relationship.

Gift Prices and Appreciation

In three studies published in 2009, Francis Flynn and Gabrielle Adams of Stanford University compared what those giving gifts expected with what recipients reported. Givers assumed that a pricier gift would make the recipient feel more appreciated, and recipients did not report more appreciation for costlier gifts. In one study, men predicted that their fiancées would appreciate a more expensive engagement ring, and the fiancées’ own ratings showed no such link. In another, graduates valued a CD as much as an iPod. The researchers estimated that a giver might spend $100 on a present the recipient would only have paid $80 for.

Ring and Wedding Spending

Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo Mialon of Emory University surveyed more than 3,000 ever-married adults in the United States and found that higher spending on the wedding went with a shorter marriage and lower spending with a longer marriage. Men who spent $2,000 to $4,000 on an engagement ring had a divorce rate about 1.3 times that of men who spent $500 to $2,000. The authors stated that the data show a correlation and do not prove that expensive rings or ceremonies cause divorce.

Spending on Shared Activities

In a national telephone survey of 1,279 adults, published in 2003, Van Boven and Gilovich compared the happiness from buying an activity or event with the happiness from buying an object. Of those surveyed, 57% said an experiential purchase had made them happier, compared with 34% who named a material one, after differences in price were taken into account. A 2014 study by Kumar, Killingsworth and Gilovich found that people also get more happiness from looking forward to an experiential purchase than from looking forward to a material one. In a later review, Van Boven argued that activities and events tend to improve in memory, have more social value and are harder to compare unfavourably than material possessions.

The Kumar finding applies to a dinner or a weekend away booked weeks ahead. When the two partners choose the date and the venue together, they can set the cost at a level the partner on a budget can meet.

A Spending Gap Between Partners

A spending gap is two people with different habits and different limits sharing one calendar. Each can keep their own habits in the parts of life they do not share. The shared part needs an agreement on which costs are joint and how they are split, made early and revisited when either person’s income changes. For a couple in which one partner enjoys luxury, that usually means fewer shared plans, chosen with more care and priced at a level both people can reach.