New York is the most romantic city in the world (shut up, Paris). If you’re going to fall crazy in love and get married, this is the place to do it. But if you’re really in it for the long haul, you’ll need to start thinking less “Moonstruck” and more “Wall Street,” says a new book, “Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage and Dirty Dishes.”
Take Nancy Cuervo and Eric Appleton. In their carefree early years, cohabiting in a rented Boerum Hill apartment, the pair didn’t pay much attention to domestic chores. “We didn’t really talk much about it, like, ‘I’ll do this, you should do that,’ ” says Cuervo, 35. “As a result, not much got done.”
And that was OK. But, she says, when they married and bought a place in Sunset Park, “some sort of adult gene kicked in and I really wanted to make housework a priority.” At her urging, they planned to split the work right down the middle, each doing half of every job. Sensible enough, right?
“He started slipping on his end of the bargain,” says Cuervo, a freelance illustrator and yoga teacher. “Not intentionally — I have more flexible hours, since he works full-time and I work from home. But the more he did that, the more I felt like we needed to talk about it. There were lots of talks.”
“I wanted to help, but I wasn’t available to do housework at the same time Nancy was,” says 39-year-old Appleton, director of education at a nonprofit organization. “I mostly felt guilty.”
What the couple needed, say the authors of “Spousonomics,” was to think of their marriage in financial terms.
“Economics is the study of the allocation of resources,” says co-author Jenny Anderson, a reporter who has covered the financial industry. “And in your marriage you have a very finite number of resources — limited time, energy, money, love.”
“And patience,” adds co-author Paula Szuchman, a business news journalist.
“A lot of marriage is figuring out the allocation of those things,” Anderson says, “and fighting over what feels like an imbalance to each person.”
In Cuervo and Appleton’s case, there were two financial concepts that applied to solving their problem. First was “specialization” — what chores were they each best suited for? — and second was “comparative advantage.” How could they streamline the chore system so they could maximize their free time?
“In every company, everybody has their role, what they’re good at,” Szuchman says. “Not everybody can do everything, because that would be completely inefficient. So the way businesses operate is through specialization.”
For Cuervo and Appleton, this would eventually translate to Cuervo doing many of the day-to-day chores, because she was around to do them, while Appleton was tasked with major household repairs on the weekends. “I guess it is sort of a gender stereotype,” Cuervo says, “but I don’t care — it works for me and it works for him.”
In “Spousonomics,” Szuchman and Anderson apply economic strategies to a wide range of common marital struggles. And they started with the test cases they knew best: their own marriages.
“I tend to be able to argue with my husband, Nivi, all night,” says Szuchman, 36. “I like to be right. I like to have resolution. We would have these blowouts where I couldn’t stop arguing.”
This, she says, exemplifies the concept of “loss aversion.” “We hate losing so much that we will do anything not to lose,” Szuchman says. “And then we lose even more. That’s why they have pawn shops next to casinos. They know that the more people lose, the more they bet the house.”
She took inspiration from David Einhorn, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund manager profiled in the book. “He recognizes this tendency of people to make rash decisions when you’re very emotional,” says Anderson, 38. So when he starts worrying about the performance of a company he’s invested a ton of money in, “he’s not going to buy or sell a single share based on his initial reaction. He’ll take his file on the company and he’ll put it in the drawer and sleep on it.”
Contrary to the conventional relationship wisdom, if you think like a financial wizard, sometimes it does pay to go to bed angry.
“That concept was very personal for me,” says Szuchman. “I have locked myself in the bathroom, crying, to allow my husband to have a little bit of space, and calmed myself down, and gone to sleep.
“And 9 times out of 10,” she adds, “in the morning we hate each other less.”
The authors got an earful on one subject in particular during what they refer to in the book as their “Exhaustive, Groundbreaking, and Very Expensive Marriage Survey.” “We heard a lot of couples saying they wanted to be having more sex,” says Anderson. “But they’re not. It was always, they’re too tired, too stressed, I was angry at him . . . but really, too tired was at the top of the list.”
In economic terms, this is supply and demand: If the cost of something gets too high, demand for it goes down. For the tired couples, sex seemed too high a cost to pay for time that could be spent sleeping or vegging on the couch.
“We found couples who found innovative ways to lower their own costs,” Anderson says. “One couple used to have good sex in the beginning, like everybody, but then their jobs intensified, and they had a kid.
“So they proposed they were going to have sex three times a week. It didn’t have to involve candles, or oils or massages, or foreplay — OK, some foreplay,” Anderson amends. “They would have sex after they put the kid to bed, but before they had dinner.”
“If you wait until after you eat, you’re catatonic,” says Szuchman. “You can’t eat first. That’s law No. 1 of more sex.”
By making sex less of a big deal — or a cost — the couple found they wanted it more often.
Another important concept is incentivizing. Ever notice that yelling at your significant other doesn’t tend to yield the result you’re looking for (i.e., to get them to do things the way you’d like them done)? This is what’s known as a “coercive incentive,” and as Anderson knows from firsthand experience, it often backfires.
“I can be very harsh and sort of unforgiving about things,” she admits. “I would constantly punish my husband for things he wasn’t doing. The example I give in the book, which has come up about 17 million times, is if my husband didn’t do something he said he was going to do, I would immediately challenge him on it. It was a completely inefficient incentive to get what I wanted.”
Then there was the case of Sarah Cohen and Nilay Oza, a married couple in Sag Harbor who were going to the mat over who changed the cat litter in the morning, a task both hated. “We agreed that whoever gets up in the morning first to make coffee has to do the cat litter, too,” says Cohen, 35. But it turned out all they’d incentivized was laziness. Cohen found herself getting annoyed at her husband: “I’m getting up to do the coffee, and you’re just sitting in bed and checking e-mail!”
The solution: attach something attractive to the bargain. In this case, time to work out — which was in extremely short supply given their new baby. “It was my husband’s idea that whoever got up in the morning to exercise has to do the coffee and the cat litter,” Cohen says. “And it’s worked really well!”
Perhaps paving the way for their next book, the authors also found their economic theories apply to the stress that comes with raising young children: “There are so many hard moments in the day, when you’re constantly doing everything for these helpless creatures,” Anderson says. “But it’s a big upfront investment for what’s going to be a very long-term payoff. You’ve got to be a long-term value investor and not a speculator.”