Amanda Jayne Miller

Waiting to Be Asked: Gender, Power, and Relationship Progression Among Cohabiting Couples

The majority of young married Americans lived with their spouses before the wedding, and many cohabited with partners they did not wed. Yet little is known about how cohabitating relationships progress or the role gender norms play in this process. This article explores how cohabiting partners negotiate relationship progression, focusing on several stages where couples enact gender. Data are from in-depth interviews with 30 working-class couples (n = 60). The women in this sample often challenged conventional gender norms by suggesting that couples move in together or raising the issue of marriage. Men played dominant roles in initiating whether couples became romantically involved and progressed to a more formal status. Although women and men contest how gender is performed, cohabiting men remain privileged in the arena of relationship progression. The findings suggest that adherence to conventional gender practices even among those residing in informal unions perpetuates women’s secondary position in intimate relationships.

The ecology of relationships: Meeting locations and cohabitors’ relationship perceptions

Locations where individuals meet romantic partners may influence the composition and perceived extent of network social support for relationships. In this article, we use in-depth qualitative interviews to examine how 62 cohabiting couples (124 individuals) met their romantic partners, whether this differentiates respondents’ perceptions of support for their relationships, and how this varies by social class. Many of the cohabiting couples in our sample met through friends and family members who can be considered strong ties. Couples also frequently reported meeting in the community, often while pursuing hobbies. Shared network ties and common interests are often attributed to facilitating the progression of relationships. Couples who met through more anomic settings—at a bar or via the Internet—less often viewed their ways of meeting as socially acceptable; many of these couples devised cover stories to tell others about how they met. Our results suggest that those who meet via weak ties perceive lower levels of support for their unions. Working-class couples meet in more anomic settings or through weaker ties more frequently than their middle-class counterparts. Results are interpreted in light of their implications for the diverging family outcomes of working-class and middle-class young adults.

Stalled for Whom? Change in the Division of Particular Housework Tasks and Their Consequences for Middle- to Low-Income Couples:

Whether the gender revolution has transformed couple behavior across all social classes is the subject of ongoing scholarly debate. The authors explore cohort change in the performance of individual routine and nonroutine housework tasks among middle- to low-income couples as well as their association with several aspects of relationship quality. Data are from the second wave (1992–1994) of the National Survey of Families and Households and the 2006 Marital and Relationship Survey. Contrary to arguments of a stalled gender revolution, the authors find that contemporary couples more often share all routine tasks (other than shopping) than couples in the past, with the greatest change in dishwashing and laundry. The equal sharing of housework is more positively related to sexual intimacy and relationship satisfaction among more recent cohorts and more negatively related to marital discord. The division of dishwashing, among all tasks, is most consequential to relationship quality, especially for women.