Happy Valentine’s Day people!
Allen Parkman studies why some people stay together and other divorce. His paper “The Importance of Gifts in Marriage,” begins by noting, as other researchers had, that unlike people in his parents’ generation, those marrying more recently were seeking increases in psychological welfare in addition to material gains. To the author’s mind, many gains come from gifts, which he defined as an offering where you incur a cost but receive no direct or immediate benefit.
That certainly encompasses all of the usual trinkets and baubles. While we don’t know how total spending on these things changes over time, Thomas Bradbury, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies marriage, noted that the grand totals were not the right metric. He suggested considering the proportion of income that people spent instead.
This makes a lot of sense. After all, there is a display of plumage that goes on during many courtships, a wooing based in part on establishing one’s credentials as an exceedingly generous soul. A lot of disposable income goes toward this sort of thing.
Born Curious 
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