by Valerie Alexander

I love my husband!  Oh, Lord, do I ever love my husband.  He is so good at this whole “being married” thing that he actually makes me a better person.  And we are such opposites that making a life together provides daily doses of laughter and insanity.

To make really clear how different we are, I am a frugal person – that would probably be one of the first five adjectives friends would use to describe me, and prior to meeting me, my husband had never used a coupon in his life.  In fact, I don’t think he’d ever even looked at a price tag.  There is a saying that goes: “A woman will buy something she doesn’t want if she can get it for half price and a man will pay twice the price to get something he wants.”  That is us to a tee, except I would never spend money on something I don’t want, and he would pay five times the price for something he wants.

So, I have eased up a lot, and taught myself not to care as much about the cost of what I’m getting as about the value, and he pauses every now and then to see if something he’s buying could be obtained for less.

And the big change is that he is willing to use a coupon, if one happens to be in his hand at the time he’s making the purchase.  He won’t go hunt for one, or cut one out of the paper, but if it’s right there, he is willing to hand it to the cashier.  Huzzah!  Where this has the most impact is in the use of shopper programs, for which all he has to do is give them our phone number and they can see if there are any discounts already on my account.  He actually has fun doing this now, and is amazed that saving money can be that easy.  I am endlessly amused that this is all so new to him.

So, last night on the way home, he stopped at CVS (a drugstore here in California) to buy something he’d run out of and decided to pick up, rather than tell me to add to my shopping list.  Holding the one item he’d purchased, he said, “And hey, I gave them our phone number and saved $1.48!” I cringed deep down in my soul, then turned and said, “That’s awesome!”  He was so happy about it, and proud to have remembered to do that, that I could be nothing but happy, despite the fact that he had used my one-time, “20% off your entire purchase” discount that I had earned the previous quarter, and was planning to use this Saturday when I finally got the chance to go to CVS and spend over $150 on items that we’ve been needing for a while, but I’ve been waiting to get all at once.

So, he saved $1.48 and it cost us over $30, but I have no reason to tell him that.  It’s done, and he had no way of knowing, and I don’t want to discourage his newly-embraced couponing activity, and he doesn’t read this blog, so will never know.  I love him so much, and this kind of thing just reminds me how happy I am to be married to a man who is willing to do something so outside his comfort zone simply because I want him to.

For the rest of my life, I will never remember or care about the $30 that we didn’t save this week, but I will always know that when faced with the choice of being negative in the face of someone else’s effort to make me happy, I chose to embrace happiness.

It’s the best way to go through life.