Men are from Mars Women are from Venus

So it's no secret that in our home my husband is the spender and I am the, hmm, would be saver if we had extra to save. My husband put in a vacation day for last week so he worked 5 days but got paid for 6. Mistakenly, he told me that he'd done this so I worked it into the budget. "Worked it into the budget" means moved payments around so that everything would be getting paid on time (as opposed to two things I was going to be paying late) and sort of covered some of his back spending (dinner out with friends and a few CD's he recently purchased) with the extra income. I always do this. I literally look over and sometimes re-work the budget every single day.

We don't fight about money any more, hardly ever anyway. At the beginning of this year I made a conscious decision that yes we are married and this is a union but he is his own person and our marriage isn't worth ruining over constant battling about the budget. Money will never be that important to me. I have stuck to my decision and hardly pester or even question him about, in my mind, nonsense over spending. And in truth I think he's done better with his purchasing decisions this year then ever before. (it's worth noting, again, that this is our highest ever debt payoff year)

When he told me yesterday what he planned to purchase with the extra money from the vacation day I should have seen it coming but I hadn't. I told him that I'd already worked it into the budget and he could tell I was extremely frustrated. He said something like, "Why do you do that? When there's extra just leave it alone." He said something about how I "could have all the extra money" from the upcoming holiday pay. Then I got mad and I might have yelled at him when I said, "You mean to pay bills! You know I never buy ANYTHING for myself right?!?! Nothing! EVER!"

So here's where it gets kind of funny and the only reason I even bothered to type any of this out, I really try to keep him out of this blog. Every time I mention him I get well intentioned comments from readers about how he needs to grow up and things along that line. I don't need to hear things like that. He is my husband and he sucks with money but he is a good man. Well, I had three books sitting in my shopping cart on Amazon. I hadn't intended to purchase any of them anytime soon (and probably would have gotten them from the library). They were all used, pretty cheap books but each had several dollars shipping costs so they came out to about $6 each. I put them in the shopping cart online so that I didn't forget that I wanted them.

After our argument I went to work and he went to Amazon and purchased the three books. Then when I got home he told me that he wasn't going to buy the thing he'd planned to buy (it wasn't exactly a cheap item) and that he'd gotten the books for me that were in the cart. I never told him that he couldn't or not to buy what he wanted. And now I will be getting two books about MONEY and frugality and a children's book for little Abe about bravery. I don't think he knows that he just bought two books about spending less for me. That's funny right? What an incredibly odd form of an apology to your wife when fighting about spending too much money. I hope this little story made some of you giggle. I keep laughing to myself about it.

Just as a man is fulfilled through working out the intricate details of solving a problem, a woman is fulfilled through talking about the details of her problems.
- John N. Gray
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus