“You saved $58.00,” the cashier said to me as she handed me the receipt for the cute summer dress. “And that’s exactly what I tell my husband,” I replied. She chuckled and we exchanged a knowing nod. We each fully understood that this dress, marked down twice on clearance and then with a coupon tendered, was a total deal—it would almost be wrong not to have bought it. Where men ask “What did it cost?” women say “This is what I saved…” Somewhere into our second decade (yes, decade) of marriage my husband stopped trying to understand my logic when shopping. He stopped pointing out what I had to spend to save because he finally realized that my brain simply did not compute his logic. Around the same time, I gave up trying to understand why he had 32 different kinds of string and dozens of power strips hanging on the pegboard in the basement. For me, what was most frustrating was that whenever we needed string—or a power strip—what we already owned “wasn’t the ri...
