Abstract
Cohabitation, nonmarital coresidence of sexual partners, is more common today than ever before in the United States. Family scientists and social demographers have yet to figure out what the growth in cohabitations implies for the future of families or gender relations within heterosexual couples. Although social scientists recognize that cohabitation covers a variety of arrangements, relatively few have analyzed differentiation by class status. Cohabitation Nation is an important addition to the literature for providing in-depth interview data to illustrate the experiences of cohabiting couples, how their relationships started and how they progressed. Especially relevant is the presentation of class variation. While gender shapes roles within cohabiting unions, class positions couples on different trajectories, with varying opportunities for strengthening relationships and deepening commitment.
Sassler and Miller’s analysis is organized around a comparison of two samples of cohabitors. “Service-class” cohabitors, called such because of their occupations, were recruited at a community college. Despite the recruitment location, most were not enrolled and those that were attending classes typically did so only part-time. “Middle-class” cohabitors, in contrast, typically had college degrees and were in professional positions. The 30 service-class cohabitors completed separate in-depth semi-structured interviews in 2004-2005 and the 31 middle-class cohabitors were interviewed in 2005-2006.
Three chapters focus on the progression of relationships from acquaintances to dating, from dating to cohabitation, and from cohabitation to marriage proposal. Sassler and Miller’s data clearly illustrate the normative constraints women face when interested in starting a relationship. Women can flirt and make themselves available and, like men, they hold veto power. They can even outright challenge men to make their interest in a relationship clear. But even when they are overt, they pressure men to invite them on a date rather than make the invitation themselves.
Once dating, women are sometimes the ones to invite partners to start cohabiting, but for relationships clearly headed toward marriage the man is much more likely to have initiated the transition to shared housing. The overwhelming majority of cohabitors see marriage proposals as “men’s prerogative.” Middle-class cohabiting women, however, were able to push the issue, often giving their partners a timeline.
Service-class cohabitors were generally less satisfied with their relationships and less eager to marry. Those service-class women who wanted to marry raised the issue, but they appear to have little leverage to make anything happen. Of course, there’s a bias in a sample of currently cohabiting couples, who are more likely to have been stuck in “limbo” than those who’ve broken up or moved on to marriage. Nonetheless, the class differences in the gender dynamics are striking. One wonders why service-class women are so disempowered in these relationships and why so much of the social science narrative is about economic disempowerment of men.
Most cohabiting couples were conventional not only in their views on marriage proposals, but also in the division of domestic labor. Women often did the majority of the housework. Nonetheless, a sizeable minority claimed to share domestic chores equally. This was more common among the middle-class cohabitors, perhaps because men in middle-class cohabiting couples lived in houses where there was more maintenance and outdoor work. Middle-class conventional couples are more satisfied with their arrangement than service-class women. Middle-class women were more effective in asking for help and middle-class men were more willing to respond.
Middle-class couples were also more likely to use effective contraception and to work as a team to prevent pregnancies. Service-class couples were more heterogenous. Some were using effective contraception, whereas others did not do so effectively or in coordination. Despite their more effective contraception, the middle-class couples had more pregnancy scares, perhaps because they more firmly did not want a pregnancy at this time. The greater ambivalence of service-class couples about the potential for a pregnancy might partly account for their lower efficacy. Yet at least as important were the barriers to accessing preferred forms of contraception, such as cost. Juggling multiple jobs with inconsistent schedules can make it hard to make it to a clinic for an exam and prescription. Changing jobs makes it difficult to navigate insurance. Higher hurdles to effective contraception contribute to more unwanted pregnancy, a situation that might be addressed by increasing women’s access to affordable long-acting reversible contraception.
As any good exploratory work will, this book leads to more questions than answers. Sassler and Miller suggest that norms about who initiates dates and proposes marriage are the vestigial remains of old courtship rituals. But why was the challenge to norms about nonmarital coresidence successful while norms about who might ask whom out on a date persist? Why are service-class men especially able to maintain a dominant position in family life as their economic position becomes more precarious, while middle-class cohabiting women have ceded power in their relationships? This detailed look at cohabiting couples’ lives has great promise for theory building and for lively classroom discussions.