After 24 years of marriage, I have started to realize that men and women think differently. About almost everything.
In our house I pay the bills every month and, in general, manage our finances. I am always concerned with where our next meal is coming from (well, perhaps I exaggerate a little) and whether we have the money to pay for tires for the car. One of my wife’s jobs — a lot more than I have — is to do the grocery shopping. She even uses coupons and our grocery store membership card when she shops. (I somehow forget to take the coupons with me when I occasionally do the shopping.) Anyway, she does the shopping in a careful, frugal manner, and I am grateful for that.
But here’s the thing. Whenever she comes home with the groceries, she always shows me the sales receipt and proceeds to tell me how much she saved us that day by using the grocery card or the coupons. At the same time I am standing there wondering how much she spent (turns out it was $176.39) and struggling with myself not to say something like, “Gosh, if you had spent $450, you could have saved us even more.”
So here she is happy that she just saved us $33.44, and I’m thinking we just spent $176.39.
When men go to shop for something, they want to know how much it will cost. When women go shopping — always on a sale day, by the way — they are thinking in terms of how much they are saving. I guess it’s a matter of point of view.
That prompted me to write this poem.
The Tissue Issue
My spouse and me, we mostly agree
On bigger things like houses and such
Our monthly bills, she leaves them to me —
Dislike the chore, but not that much.
Over the years six houses we’ve bought
We prodded and poked at this one and that
Then decided at last with hardly a thought
When the right one we saw, it was simply a snap.
It’s over the little things we’ve come to discover
We argue and bitch and complain to each other
It’s the toilet roll refill when that is the issue
Whether it’s over or under for that damn tissue.
— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business, but he is a small-business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE. The opinions and comments in this column are his alone and do not represent the opinions or policies of any outside organization. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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