Which means you both regularly test/use the flashlights, and have an overall maintenance discipline around them that's so habituated that you're probably not consciously aware of it. For most people, a flashlight would be something that you may have one or two of, stored in a drawer somewhere... maybe, since last you saw one of them was 2 years ago. Batteries are probably long dead already, and you might not have spares.

Candles win by price and maintenance simplicity. They are cheap enough that you may have dozens of them (some for emergency in your emergency pack, some for romantic evening in the kitchen, a few buried in random drawers around the house, a few more for... what follows the romantic evening, etc.), and when you find some, they're pretty much guaranteed to work. As a bonus, candles come with a clear, visual indicator of remaining "charge" - something most flashlights don't have.

You're describing my LED situation here :)

(Well, except for romance; LEDs are too stark and cold, and I'm no longer a goth).

Seriously, I hate warm lights. They're gloomy and make me spend 90% of my energy fighting to stay awake. I don't get why people are so fond of them (and why they're always keeping their places way underlit). I must be just wired differently.

How do we reconcile our differences here? :) It's just something that has happened to me.

I also do a lot of camping in sub zero temperatures, lithium ion is pretty hopeless when it gets cold. Lot of managing the batteries, keeping them in your clothes etc.

That's probably the key difference. I never camp in less than a comfortable summer.