A Different View with Dave O’Connell

With St Valentine’s Day firmly on the horizon, thoughts for some may turn to love and even marriage – which, it transpires, is good for your health but tough on your pocket.

Because while one study published this week found that true love generally results in low blood sugar levels, particularly for adults over fifty, a more frivolous report found that, if you steered clear of romantic gestures, you’d be nearly €70,000 better off in just five years.

There’s a sort of health warning with this one too, to the extent that this spend makes allowance for regular trips to the jewellers for diamonds – as opposed to the petrol station for dried flowers – but even still keeping up with the romantic gestures comes at quite a cost.

The survey, which is a UK one and therefore comes with sterling prices, puts the average cost of a meal for two at just over £100, which it pencils in as a monthly occurrence.

A dozen red roses from Marks & Spencer’s costs £25.99 – and God help you if you appear at the front door carrying flowers from a supermarket – while they also estimate monthly grooming costs as £50 per month per person.

Balancing out cost of diamonds and ancillary romantic gestures, the survey from Unbiased.co.uk puts the cost of true love at somewhere around £800 a month – or loose change short of €900 in our money.

That adds up to just under £60,000 over five years or if true love lasts the distance, a massive £650,000 over a quarter of a century.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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