Reading: Spousonomics. It’s not you, it’s the dishes.

spousonomics book

Spousonomics talks about equity in the marriage and sharing the load. It’s something I still struggle with. I don’t think the division of labour can ever be completely equal, Fair Play offers cards, an accountable way to divide the labour, but I think between couples, religiously keeping score can’t be great for the relationship. You win some and you lose some, and sometimes we just have to take one for the team.

Well, I picked this up at the Taipa Macau library the other day and enjoyed it so much. I was always afraid of math throughout my school life, I was never good at numbers and I also dropped economics at A levels because it was too much for my humanities focused mind to process.

I only got to appreciate this so much more when I join the ranks of corporate hounds, where conversions and return on investments were all I had focus on – how does the investment in PR and communications translate into business? Spousonomics is basically economics between spouses and the mutal goal is for the best outcomes.

In my previous life, I was a copywriter and busy selling dreams and creating wonderful concepts, few seem to really bother about sale conversions, as long as it looked clever, good and won advertising awards. It was the accounts director job to sell it to the client. But the most brilliant creatives were also marketeers from crafting the perfect headline to psychologically selling a dream.

This book alludes everything to law of economics and productivity and how partnership is never always fair and equal – it should always be for the greater good and the best and largest yield. If only all of us ran our relationships with the same suite of skills we use in our day to day professional lives.

I personally am not a fan of the word “compromise” in a relationship, because it means that one party is getting the shorter end of the stick, and has a slight negative connotation. I prefer to negotiate, in quite the same way of how economics lead in creating the optimum marriage.

Almost everyone I know makes marriage sound like a walk in a park and no one is actually ever honest about real life where there are of course squabbles and disagreements, but I barely see any admission to all that. I admit it, marriage is hard work and even harder when as a couple both have demanding gruelling schedules.

The book brings each point across illustrating an economics scenario from second hand car salesmen, trading to insurance policies and introduces couples in several different situations and how their problems (whether it is communication/workload/investment of time etc) could be solved in the optimum way possible, acknowledging all the “opportunity costs” and “sunken costs”, long and short term investments and applying that to marriage – fascinating, but makes so much sense.

I’ll leave you with a couple of quotes and a book I definitely recommend reading for couples married or not. Great advice for applying some Spousonomics ;) Lots of charts and graphs for you to process it all in context. Great read.

“Unless you’re in a truly failing marriage, fairness is a moving target. Some days may not feel fair, but over many years together, things tend to even out. Overweighing fairness in the short run may well come back to bite you in the long run – lead to some god-awful fighting along the way.”

  • Think at the margin: small changes can have big impacts too and they are much easier to pull off
  • Let sunken costs be sunken costs: You’re never going to get back what you’ve spent, whether it’s time, money, youth or energy, so don’t let any of that drive your decision making.

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