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Sure, you could tune into TV talk shows for some tough love advice about the state of your relationship, or have a sit-down for coffee with your closest girlfriends to vent about your husband’s domestic shortcomings.
But have you ever considered the advice of Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes? There’s a lot you could learn about marital bickering from these two well-known economists. So say the authors of the book, Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage & Dirty Dishes.
Authors Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson, who write for The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, have applied the market rules of cold hard capitalism to the economy of your marriage to help you efficiently allocate limited resources such as time, money, sanity, and, yes, even your sex drive.
Here are the top 7 surprising mistakes you’re making in your marriage.
1. Splitting the housework 50/50.
This is often considered the “fairest” way to split the chores, whether it’s washing the dishes or walking the dog.
But aiming for 50/50 means you’re constantly keeping score, making sure that neither of you is getting the short end of the stick, and bickering every time you think you are. Spend too much time fixating on fairness today, and you risk not making it in the long run when things often balance out.
It’s better to use a system similar to what economists call “comparative advantage,” where each of you is responsible for what you’re best at, relative to other tasks. You might handle all the bills, grocery shopping, and laundry, while your spouse sweeps, mops, and fixes things when they break.
Some weeks, you’ll end up doing more, other times it might be 75/25 in his favor — but you don’t keep track because if your husband handled the grocery shopping, you might end up with a pantry full of Tostitos.
2. Waiting until you’re ‘in the mood’ for intimacy.
Unless you’re both extremely hot and share an obsessive addiction to monogamous sex, odds are you’re not in the mood as often as you were when you first met. So if you wait until you’re turned on, months might go by before it occurs to you that maybe sex would be a fun thing to do.
Economist George Loewenstein developed a theory called the hot-cold empathy gap, which says we have two selves: a cold, clear-headed rational self that might say, “I will have sex with my husband when I come home tonight because I love him and I will enjoy it and heck, it’s good for my marriage,” and a hot, impulsive, emotion-driven, irrational self that says, when the time actually comes, “I’ve had such a bad day, I feel fat and bloated, my husband is annoying tonight… No way am I having sex. I’m going to watch Real Housewives and go to bed.”
When the time actually comes, we may not be in the mood, but we need to listen to our “cool” selves, the voice before we had a bad day. You’re not in the mood now, but you were then when you were thinking about it, and you’ll enjoy it — so just do it. You might not be in the mood, but you won’t regret it, either.
3. Assuming a rough patch is the end of the world for everyone.
Relationships go in cycles. There are ups (booms) and downs (busts), just like in the economy. They’re not only inevitable, but they’re actually healthy. They force you to see where you’ve let things slide, taken each other for granted, or just lost sight of what’s important.
Embrace the rough patches and borrow a concept from economics called “creative destruction,” or innovating in the face of crisis, and think up a novel solution to an issue that keeps dividing you.
4. Staying up to resolve an argument, even if it takes all night.
Bad idea! At a certain point — and we’ve all been there — we just want to be right, no matter what it costs. And because someone at our bridal shower advised us to never go to bed angry, we beat up ourselves and our spouses into the early morning hours in the name of “resolution.”
But the more we try to resolve (aka, win), the later it gets, and the more exhausted and resentful we become.
So yes, go to bed angry sometimes. Get some rest and sleep on it. Reconvene the anger summit in the morning when you’re both more open-minded and less riled up.
This is the economic concept of “loss aversion,” which, in simple terms, means we hate to lose. Recognizing how much we hate to lose, we need to take action to minimize the damage we do as we attempt to win at all costs.
5. When you’re trying to mind-read, or you expect your partner to do so.
This one should be obvious, and yet again, we all assume our spouse knows we need a hug (or a cocktail) after a bad day at the office or figure that he’ll wash the car on his way past the car wash because it’s so obviously dirty.
The solution: the economic principle of transparency. Give your spouse the information he or she needs, rather than expecting him to know the unknowable. Information is the grease that keeps your little economy functioning.
6. Emitting kind gestures.
We think we’ll give him that well-deserved back rub, or watch the kids so she can get out the door for a child-free afternoon, but then we flake. The time never seems right. The to-do list remains too long. We think we’re great spouses but sometimes we’re just not.
The best solution to our procrastination is to devise something economists call “commitment devices” — ways to force ourselves to commit to things.
Send your husband a text promising a back rub and you sort of have to do it. Arrange a personal training session for your wife and the kids are all yours for the afternoon.
7. Underestimating the power of small changes.
You have a long commute, but you have a big house or shoebox in the city with more time to be with the kids. When you start to think about one person quitting a job because the demands of housework and childcare are too overwhelming with both partners working, consider the smaller changes that might help first.
What if you cooked more meals on the weekend? Or hired an occasional cleaning service so neither of you has to spend your free time scrubbing the sink? Instead of grand solutions, look for incremental changes that can improve situations.
Prevention is the nation’s leading healthy lifestyle brand with tips from experts on natural cures, health, nutrition, recipes, beauty, mind-body, weight loss, and fitness.
This article was originally published at Prevention. Reprinted with permission from the author.
