alt Hacker NewsA wife is a useful thing to have in this respect, not because they tend to profligacy, but because this kind of thing is much easier to detect and fix in someone close to you than in yourself. Both my wife and I have lived frugal lives at various times[0] and I feel much happier with the degree of spending we have now.
I'm reminded of the intelligent corvids in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Memory where the sum of the two birds forms a being with intelligence in a way that the individual segments do not. The frugality is a deeply embedded piece of our being and undoing it seems hard, but together we financially operate in a place that leaves us both feeling comfortable.
0: In the US sense of the term, not in the sense of the term as known in Taiwan or India.
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Just a reminder that since a couple of centuries ago in most Western societies, wives are not "things" anymore, but rather human beings on the same level as husbands.
s/wife/spouse/
My experience has been that it's easy to say, "oh, it's just me", but much harder to subject someone you care about to the same standard that you would yourself. I'm in a similar position with the thermostat, even though something we initially bonded over was that we both kept our thermostats at a low temperature that was outside the window of being socially acceptable.