Yes, this topic does come up pretty often on here, but I also like to see the new responses.
We use a combination, like others have said. We have a joint checking account and our paychecks go in there. We also have a joint savings account and put money in regularly for emergency savings and use it as a kind of sinking account for regular large expenses like annual insurance premiums, etc.
But we also both maintain our own checking and savings accounts, and our retirement accounts are separate. Similarly, we have a joint credit card, and we also each maintain a credit card of our own. Neither of us uses our personal checking accounts or savings accounts, although we each keep a few thousand dollars separate that never really grows or changes, and is just left over from before we combined our finances.
We do this partly because we are not married, and we feel we need to maintain a full financial infrastructure (savings, checking, credit) that we could use if something happened to the other person. Inheritance laws for unmarried couples can be funky, so we each want to know that we could keep meeting our family's financial obligations if one of us was incapacitated, if our joint assets got frozen or something. I'm sure it's just paranoia, but because we're unmarried we don't feel as confident that others (banks, the IRS, etc) would view us as a financial unit if something bad happened.
So the separate accounts are mostly there to serve a purpose, but we do consider ourselves a financial partnership, and we are named as beneficiaries on all our life insurance policies, accounts etc. We own a house together and have a child together, and make all major financial decisions together.
We do fight about money, although not very often. The fights are usually because I tend to be anxious about money, and he is more relaxed. He is very frugal and generally good with money, but if things are tight it annoys him that I don't want to reduce the amount we're saving or dip into our savings account. When I get anxious about money I tend to get, um, a little bit controlling, which of course he doesn't like.
Others have mentioned trust--I agree that it would be very hard, maybe impossible, to be in a relationship with someone I didn't trust. I do trust him to spend money wisely, work hard to do his share to support our family, etc. He tends to be forgetful about financial tasks like paying bills, which makes me crazy, so I handle all the bills etc, but really I think we compliment each other well in this area.
Also, as others have said, I do think our system works well for us because we make roughly the same amount of money, with slight variations from year to year.
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