Only Middle-Class Americans Can Afford to Get Married.
Amanda Hess, Slate: Marriage Wage Gap: Post-Recession, Only Middle-Class Americans Can Afford to Get Married.
Thanks to falling working-class wages, the outsourcing of American manufacturing, the thinning of company benefits, and the rise of part-time and self-employment, American jobs are, in many ways, less stable than ever. Unskilled workers without a higher education are finding it more difficult to translate blue-collar work into middle-class stability. Many of the working-class Americans interviewed by Silva and Corse are now too concerned with maintaining their “own survival” to “imagine being able to provide materially and emotionally for others.” Meanwhile, marriage itself has transformed into a luxury item. Over the past century, the old model of obligatory American marriage, which was “rooted in male authority” and “backed by both religious and legal mandates,” gave way to “companionate” marriages dedicated to prioritizing “the couple as equal individuals” in the family structure. Now, as Silva and Corse tell it, a new age of “therapeutic” marriage has arisen to focus on the “happiness, equality, mutuality, and self-actualization of individuals.”
That self-actualization doesn’t come cheap. The rise of the freelance economy and the decline of traditional marriage has made life less regimented for middle-class Americans, too. But middle-class people benefit from the educational backgrounds and salaries necessary to stabilize their own careers and relationships outside of these traditional social structures. People like Earl and Jan can spend their paychecks on therapy, horses, college, and gyms to stay happy together. Even middle-class Americans who can’t afford to buy their kid a pony have more resources to maintain their relationships through economic instability. For people at a certain education level and salary potential, the self-employment economy can provide the flexibility to spend time with their families; sharing resources with a partner is more likely to be an investment than a risk. But people like Cindy and Megan can’t afford to invest in this new model (and the old model, where a male breadwinner provided for the family, doesn’t exist anymore). As traditional work and family structures crumble in the United States, middle-class Americans have the money to build relationships, yet remain satisfied as individuals. For working-class Americans, personal stability sometimes requires staying single and avoiding the risk of abuse, abandonment, and even more economic and emotional disruption.