{"id":1779,"date":"2019-01-16T09:59:19","date_gmt":"2019-01-16T15:59:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=1779"},"modified":"2019-01-16T09:59:19","modified_gmt":"2019-01-16T15:59:19","slug":"american-intimacy-in-times-of-escalating-inequality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2019\/01\/16\/american-intimacy-in-times-of-escalating-inequality\/","title":{"rendered":"American Intimacy in Times of Escalating Inequality"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
photo by mastertux via pixabay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A short interview with Stephanie Coontz by Virginia Rutter on a\u00a0new CCF study<\/a>.<\/p>\n

VR:\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>You edited the new\u00a0brief report on cohabitation<\/a>\u00a0trends from the Council on Contemporary Families. In it, Arielle Kuperberg reports that premarital cohabitation is more common\u2014occurring before 70 percent of marriages. But what does this new research tell us about Americans\u2019 intimate lives?\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

SC:<\/strong>\u00a0First of all, it adds to our understanding of\u00a0how quickly the norms and dynamics of personal relationships are changing. Until 1970, couples who cohabited before marriage were 82 percent more likely to divorce than those who married directly. That extra risk is now gone. Similarly,\u00a0until\u00a0the 1980s,\u00a0marriages in which wives had more education than their husbands had a higher risk of divorce\u00a0than other couples. But\u00a0since 1990 that extra\u00a0risk\u00a0has also\u00a0disappeared<\/a>. Despite constant claims to the contrary, it is\u00a0no longer true<\/a>\u00a0that marriages where the wife earns more than her husband are at higher risk of divorce. Finally, couples where the wife did most of the childcare and housework used to report better sex lives than couples with a more egalitarian\u00a0division of labor. Now\u00a0the opposite is true<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Within<\/u>\u00a0<\/em>couple relationships there are many signs of growing\u00a0equality<\/u><\/em>. But that leads to a second contribution of the paper, which illustrates the growing\u00a0inequality<\/u><\/em>\u00a0among<\/u><\/em>\u00a0couples on the basis of higher education, and in turn on their prospects for earning a family wage.<\/p>\n

VR:<\/strong>\u00a0Cohabitation looks like it is useful and valuable to many\u2014as Kuperberg shows in the reversal of that out-of-date link between cohabitation and divorce. (See her awesome Figure 3 for a visual of the reversal!) But some people don\u2019t want to cohabit. What do you think of Kuperberg\u2019s findings about religion,\u00a0escalating<\/strong>\u00a0inequality<\/strong>, and access to \u201cdirect marrying\u201d?<\/em><\/p>\n

SC:<\/strong>\u00a0Despite the widespread social acceptability of premarital\u00a0cohabitation, a minority of Americans, especially those with strong religious beliefs, continue to disapprove of the practice and\u00a0prefer to marry directly. Kuperberg highlights the painful dilemmas facing those who hold more traditional values but lack the resources to act on them.\u00a0While two-thirds of\u00a0religiously-observant women with a BA or higher did\u00a0not<\/u><\/em>\u00a0cohabit before marriage, this was true of only\u00a014 percent of equally observant women who did not attend college \u2014 and of just three percent of\u00a0religiously-observant women without a high school\u00a0diploma. As Kuperberg suggests, this is almost certainly not\u00a0because of\u00a0different\u00a0values but of\u00a0different\u00a0options.<\/p>\n

I agree\u00a0that this gap likely reflects the difficulties that less-educated couples\u00a0face in meeting the increasingly high\u00a0economic bar for marriage. And it is especially troubling\u00a0that the gap used to be just between the least-educated women and everyone else but is now greatest between the most-educated women and everyone else.\u00a0The same escalating inequality between\u00a0the most highly-educated Americans and others who work just as hard but are paid drastically less is also seen\u00a0in rates of\u00a0non-marriage and out-of-wedlock\u00a0childbearing.<\/p>\n

This divergence is likely to continue, given recent\u00a0evidence<\/a>\u00a0that, as yet,\u00a0the only group to have recovered fully from the Great Recession is people with a\u00a0bachelor\u2019s degree or higher.<\/p>\n

VR:<\/strong>\u00a0So what do you make of that? Growing equality within couples, and growing inequality between couples? \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

SC:\u00a0<\/strong>For one thing, it means that\u00a0much family instability results\u00a0not from people\u2019s different values or \u201cculture\u201d but from their inability to meet the high interpersonal and economic expectations of marriage that most Americans now embrace. I am thinking of the economically insecure people who move in together rapidly and then don\u2019t move on to marriage, resulting in a lot of churning; the growing numbers of people who are not seen as marriageable by others due to poor job prospects or low wages (low-income men right now have the worst marriage prospects); youths who lack the kind of life opportunities that give them incentives and tools to defer childbearing.<\/p>\n

For another thing, when people feel that they are being excluded from the American Dream, they often embrace short-term coping mechanisms or compensating behaviors that make their personal lives and relationships even more difficult. And with higher wage inequality, fewer work-family protections, and a weaker social safety net than other advanced industrial economies, the U.S. imposes exceptionally heavy penalties on people who become single parents or do not complete higher education, leading to lower rates of social mobility \u2013 and higher rates of personal\u00a0problems. As I\u2019ve written\u00a0elsewhere<\/a>, the long-standing American myth that individuals succeed purely on their own, on the basis of their personal \u201cgrit,\u201d actually undermines people\u2019s ability to establish families that can thrive.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Stephanie Coontz is author of\u00a0Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage<\/a>. Follow her at @StephanieCoontz. Virginia Rutter is co-editor of\u00a0Families as They Really Are<\/a>. Follow her at @VirginiaRutter.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A short interview with Stephanie Coontz by Virginia Rutter on a\u00a0new CCF study. VR:\u00a0You edited the new\u00a0brief report on cohabitation\u00a0trends from the Council on Contemporary Families. In it, Arielle Kuperberg reports that premarital cohabitation is more common\u2014occurring before 70 percent of marriages. But what does this new research tell us about Americans\u2019 intimate lives?\u00a0 SC:\u00a0First […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2095,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38855],"tags":[13248,13],"class_list":["post-1779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-three-questions","tag-cohabitation","tag-inequality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2095"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1779"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1857,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779\/revisions\/1857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}