Opposites Attract Poem by gershon hepner

Spendthrifts tend to love tightwads,
and sadists all love masochists;
we all are drawn to foreign gods,
even if we’re atheists.
Although they say birds of a feather
fly together in a flock,
it seems that friends of fairest weather
with foulest weather’s interlock,
while women who are nice prefer
to go out hotly on a date
with men who wickedly will err,
and not with arrows that are straight.

My wife and I are gifts of God,
to man, not opposites at all,
since neither truly is tightwad,
my life4 a put and hers a call.
Call us spendthrifts if you must,
since now to God we both must holler,
while calling out “In God We Trust, ”
the motto of the US dollar.
We do not ever complement
each other, but as opposites
we differ first, and then cement
our bond with classy clash of wits.

Some say yin and some say yang,
the twain should never ever part.
Whatever happens we both hang
together, at the finish start,
and when one starts at the beginning,
finish what the other started,
pious one, the other sinning,
although both up-, and not down-, hearted.


Inspired by an Op-Ed by Catherine Rampall in the NYT, August 16 (“Say Spend. You Say No. We’re in Love”) :
Despite the old saying “opposites attract, ” scholars have found that in almost every way imaginable, people tend to choose mates who look, sound and act as they do. But in the area perhaps most fraught with potential conflict — money — somehow, some way, people gravitate toward their polar opposite, a new study says. “Spendthrifts” and “tightwads” (which, as it turns out, are actual academic terms) tend to marry the other. Unfortunately, these dichotomized duos report unhappier marriages than people with more similar attitudes toward spending. How do we know all this? Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan and Northwestern University looked at several surveys that asked a married couple to assess separately their personal feelings toward spending money. (While the study used the responses of a self-selected group of online news readers, it was bolstered by a randomized poll commissioned by the researchers.)
Respondents were then rated on a Tightwad-Spendthrift scale. The labels refer not to how much people earn or spend, but how people described their feelings about spending. Spendthrifts, on this scale, say they experience too little pain when spending, leading them to spend more than they should; they later regretted their financial recklessness. Tightwads, by contrast, report feeling too much pain when spending. They have trouble parting with their pennies, and yet they frequently kick themselves for having so much difficulty living life. In other words, they live in a perpetual state of nonbuyer’s remorse. From such yin-and-yangness, love blossoms. (At least to a modest but statistically significant degree, the study found.) “Almost all prior research has found that birds of a feather flock together, ” said Scott I. Rick, a University of Michigan marketing professor who is a co-author of the study. “People have tried to find evidence of complementarity, but they usually can’t.” The major previously identified exception to that rule is on dominant and submissive personalities, traits for which opposites do tend to attract.
Why do people seek out their opposites in spending attitudes? Most likely, what we hate in ourselves, we also hate in other people. And the more we hate that quality in ourselves, the more we avoid it, the study suggested. “I can see how this might be one of those kinds of seductive differences in the early stages of courtship, ” said Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families. “Maybe you say to yourself, ‘This guy makes me feel so free, ’ or ‘This gal reins me in.’ ” Which is unfortunate. As previous studies have found, spending decisions are a common source of marital conflict and a major contributor to divorce. And as prior literature would predict, this new study showed that financially polar pairs report greater conflict over money, and lower levels of connubial bliss….
But more broadly, just like the proverbial woman who says she wants a nice guy but really goes for the bad boys, people are also just plain bad at predicting what they want in love and marriage, the researchers found. “We seem to have to have approximately no introspective accuracy as to what it is we want in a partner, ” said Eli J. Finkel, a Northwestern psychology professor who is another co-author of the study. Mr. Finkel speculated that the recession could amplify the fallout from monetary mismatchings. “People may not think about these things when they first get married, ” he said. “But a bad economy serves as a crucible for complementary marriages.”

8/16/09