The purpose of this thread is merely to indulge my curiosity and perhaps gain some insight.
First let's have the good sense to realize logical disclaimers are built into the conversation already, among these being that individual experiences are a part of the human condition, the plural of anecdote is not data, but sometimes anecdotes are all we have, and very few phenomena are absolute. No one is out to smear your personal character here, it's just some stories that may discuss a trend but trends have very little to do with individual people. These should be common sense assumptions, but assuming makes an... you know the rest.
In another thread discussing what is at this time the latest blog post (I think), there was some pondering and I made an off hand observation that was a bit off topic, so I figured rather than hijack that thread any further I'd start a fresh one.
My observation was that as a single male, I have observed a pattern in female behavior in general. When the concept of personal fiscal responsibility is brought up, unattached, divorced or single females never react favorably to the concept.
Now sometimes the response is neutral, it's not always pro spendthrift/consumerist. I can't venture a guess which way it trends within that spectrum of possibility but usually there's at least one negative reaction in there.
Conversely, it is married women, or women in life situations which are similar to marriage, who most often react positively, sometimes very positively, to the general ideas of saving more or spending less or prioritizing spending or otherwise trying to make better personal financial decisions. Some of them are neutral to ideas like thrift or savings, but usually they’re positive. In particular married women seem to love to save a buck. I’m not saying they actually ever do whatever is proposed but they seem to think it’s a noble intent.
I will give one example of what I'm talking about: some time ago, I was to attend a meeting with about a dozen participants, I was mostly there as a note taker, and the only male in the room.
And these five women are coworkers, I'm not their dear friend by any means but I am pretty familiar with their overall lifestyles as they are with mine just as matter of social interaction. Someone began to complain, and rightly so, how expensive cellular phone service had become and the question turned to what can you do about it. At the time, I had just switched to Ting. I volunteered that information and how it was saving me some $55 a month.
The three married women immediately were very curious and happy I brought it up. One of them wrote down "ting.com" on the cover of her notebook, another immediately used her phone to find the site and bookmark it, and the third asked specific questions about the service. Overall their verbal cues and body language indicated it pleased them to learn this information; it was like I had just served freshly baked cookies.
The two unattached women (one divorced and one single) were mildly disgusted, our divorcee declared "I don't think fifty bucks a month is worth not having an Iphone like some loser" (at the time Ting did not have the Iphone) and the singleton listened carefully but ultimately declared "The problem with that is, the only way you save any money is if you never call or text anybody, so if you're saving money that means you're a loser." Their general cues were as if I had just told them about having bad diarrhea with intense and quite unnecessary olfactory detail.
The point here isn't how valid any of those reactions are, the point is they follow a clear pattern of the pleasant satisfaction from the wives and a chastening or general disgust from the unwed, where the stimulus is always a mention of personal fiscal responsibility or personal financial improvement.
There just seems to be a pattern, for some reason, in the tiny little slice of humanity I seem to be observing. I've pondered before why this is.
Part of it may be that statistically, married people (regardless of gender) tend to be better with money in nearly every metric imaginable. So maybe it's because people who are good with money tend to get married, ergo I see this pattern in everyday life.
Or it could go the other way. Maybe people who are single vs. married have different priorities overall for whatever reason. I mean I used to be a real idiot with money (Shocking!), but thankfully for us all many other people are also former idiots, so maybe marriage is an event that causes such a personal reform.
The main flaw in those hypotheses is they are gender neutral and my observations are not. Male reactions to something like the Ting conversation seem to not yield this pattern. I have thought maybe it's me, maybe I'm obnoxious and just don't realize it, but if that were the case why would anyone react positively?
I even think it's fair to speculate I might have an observational bias, but I don't think that's the case.
So I am left assuming it has to be something else but I'm not sure what that would be.
And I have a deep suspicion that there will be many people who have a completely different experience to report, which is just peachy.