A few thoughts on Stephanie Coontz’s “The Disestablishment of Marriage”

Stephanie Coontz wrote a valuable piece on the state of marriage that was published a few days ago in the New York Times.  She talks about numerous trends in her piece, and I think it’s very much worth reading. You can read it here.

Some of you have written to ask me about the comment she makes at the end of the piece about premarital cohabitation, wherein she suggests that it is no longer associated with higher risks in marriage. I have a few brief points about that part.

1.  I think what Manning and Cohen actually found was that, among those who cohabited prior to marriage since 1995, cohabitation before marriage was no longer associated with increased risk for divorce among those who were engaged first (particularly, in the female data). This parallels what we keep finding, though it is fair to say that the finding is a bit murkier (and complex) in that paper.

2. Manning and Cohen’s study does not assess marital quality outcomes, which our research team has long predicted will be associated with the clarity two partners have about commitment to the future (especially to marriage) prior to cohabiting.  That’s because we believe that cohabiting makes it harder to break up, and that this is the detail most people seem oblvious to as they slide into cohabiting.  That matters because it can make it harder to break up before two people have decided for sure they want to be together—long-term. People can raise their odds of getting stuck in the wrong place. We consistently find, including in recent samples, that cohabiting before either engagement or marriage is associated with lower average marital quality (less happiness, poorer communication, etc.).  That, and other predictions we test, are all consistent with this theory that the greater inertia of cohabiting sneaks up on some people and keeps them in relationships they would have otherwise left before ever marrying. 

3. Coontz also notes that there is some evidence within the data Manning and Cohen analyzed suggesting that cohabitation (quoting Coontz) “with definite plans to marry at the outset is tied to lower levels of marital instability than direct entry into marriage” among disadvantaged women with high risks. In other words, cohabiting may actually be associated with doing better in marriage for some groups. This is a rare finding but there is some reason to expect it. I explained why I thought such a finding might show up in a post a while ago (it can be found in the fourth link below, which is one of my longest, most theoretical prior posts on cohabitation and marriage).  

I’m going to list a number of links to prior posts of mine for those of you who want to read more deeply about the theory and research of our team related to the types of cohabitation prior to marriage that might be riskier, and why. Some of these posts are more fun but still explain the theory well (see playlist to paylist) and others are pretty heavy duty theory and conceptual reasoning, if you are really wanting to dig in deeper on this subject. 

If you want to read a summary of our studies and theory in this area (cohabitation prior to marriage, etc.), you can download the file at the first link below. 

The summary document of our research and studies on cohabitation.  

A fun blog entry likening one risk of cohabiting to choosing an iPhone or anAndroid phone (or, Windows Mobile, if you like)

A post on the increasing phenomenon of CohabiDating 

A long, detailed post on theory related to cohabiting, marriage, and signals ofcommitment. (Relatively heavy duty compared to other things here, and the last in a series on some bigger issues in science about selection.)

A post from last year about one of the media dust-ups on the risks, or not, ofcohabiting prior to marriage

Have at it!  

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Some Basic Facts About the High School Class of 2013

The research firm Child Trends released a report recently about the High School Class of 2013.  Here are a few of the numbers that stood out to me.

As they say, “Imagine a senior class of 100” students.  

•    71 have experienced physical assault; 28 have been victimized sexually; 32 have experienced some form of child maltreatment.
•    68 will go on to a college or university.
•    64 have had sexual intercourse.
•    51 used NO alcohol, cigarettes, or illicit drugs during the past 30 days
•    48 are sexually active (64 have had sexual intercourse)
•    45 watch less than an hour of TV on weekdays; 20 watch 4 or more hours on weekdays
•    39 have ever been bullied, physically or emotionally; 16 have been bullied in the past year
•    35 eat meals together with their families 6 or 7 days a week
•    29 felt “sad and hopeless” continuously for at least two weeks during the past year
•    28 attend religious services at least once at week
•    24 were binge-drinking in the past two weeks.
•    23 smoked marijuana in the past 30 days
•    21 had a sexually transmitted infection in the past year
•    14 thought seriously about attempting suicide in the past year
•    12 have ADHD
•    10 reported they were victims of dating violence in the past year
•    10 report they have been raped

I was surprised that 35 of 100 regularly have meals with their families. In some families, work patterns make this almost impossible, but for most families, it’s a possible but increasingly rare thing to have family meals. Many experts believe that meals together is one basic marker of how connected a family is, and, very likely, how good of a sense parents have about how their children are doing. My colleague Howard Markman and I were doing a training in Norway years ago, and I remember that the Norwegians had a strong tradition of families singing folk songs and having dinner together. This was years ago, but at the time, they had recently gone from just having a couple of national TV channels to having cable and scores of channels. I still remember clearly one of our colleagues there telling us how having many channels on TV had rapidly started to wipe out family meals. That’s very sad. That’s the simple type of stuff that probably matters a lot for how children will do in life.

It’s not surprising that the data show that most high school students have had sex and nearly half are sexually active. But that’s a lot of opportunity for sliding into life altering consequences at a young age in life. As one example or risk, 21 of 100 report having had an STD within the past year. That’s a lot of disease.

The data that stood out most to me in these numbers are the ones about binge drinking and smoking marijuana. Nearly a quarter of high school seniors have done one or the other recently, as of the time surveyed, which means a lot of teens do one or both regularly.

There is some good news here, such as in the number of students who will go to college. Not everyone can, should, or needs to, but that high number reflects some opportunity for a lot of seniors. Of course, not all those 68 of 100 will really go to college, and many fewer will complete college.

Overall, these numbers reflect a lot of evidence of how much risk older teens are regularly taking on. If you are a parent and your teenager is at all open to it, hang out with him or her a bit more. Get a meal together. Play a game. Go out and do something he or she likes. Whenever you have a little opportunity, talk with your teenage about whatever he or she will talk about, day-to-day. That way, you will have the most relationship possible to talk about what he or she might need to talk about some day in the future. 


You can read more about the research findings, here. 

[Their technical note: Child Trends Senior Research Scientist David Murphey provided the statistical composite by examining available data for U.S. high school seniors (or youth of about that age) that are nationally representative, and as close in time to 2013 as is available.]

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A Couple of Great Pieces on Fatherhood

It's Father's Day.

I read two really good pieces on fatherhood and men this morning. The first is in Slate Magazine, by Brad Wilcox, called "Daddy's Home."  It's a terrific piece on some of the ways that being a father changes men. In it, he highlights that the impacts are greatest as long as the man lives with his children and their mother (and, of course, the positive impacts are non-existent when the man is not involved in the lives of the children at all).

The next piece I want to recommend to you is also by Brad Wilcox. This one, however, focuses on the "The Distinct, Positive Impact of a Good Dad" in the lives of children. It is in the Atlantic. In this piece, Wilcox addresses the question of evidence that there is something special about what men do in the fathering role and, thereby, add to the lives of their children. The question that is being raises is an important one at a time in our culture when ever fewer men are substantially involved in the lives of their children.

These two pieces bring me back to the video I shared in my last post. While there are many exceptions,we know from accumulating studies that the surest way for men to be involved in raising their children is for men to remain involved with the mother of their children. Now check out the video I posted.  You will see five involved fathers (along with five involved mothers).  The blog post is here.  The video I posted is here. 

Usual caveat, seriously stated: Many children are doing great in single parent families and many single parents are the reason why. But it's a great thing when a child has both parents pulling for him or her in life. And it's a powerful thing in the life of a man.  If you are a father, I hope you have a Happy Father's Day, and more, a meaningful year to come as a father. 

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In Honor of Father’s Day: A Little Video of Five Families

I have a brief video I want to share with you. It’s about families. Five families, in fact. It’s footage I captured on my iPhone the other day on the way home from work.  

It will only take 1 minute, 11 seconds of your life to watch it. I’ve entitled it, “Getting Parenting Down.”

I’m sharing this in honor of father’s day. The video shows five different families. In each, the parents are working together to raise and protect their children.

I hope you enjoy the video.  Here it is (click here).

I know that father’s day (and mother’s day) are complicated, even painful, for many people based on either their family(s) growing up or what they have experienced with a co-parent as an adult. But if you are a parent, and, especially this week if you are a father, here’s to doing what you are able to do to raise and protect the young ones before they fly away.

Have a Great Father’s Day

[You can download a copy of the video here if you like.]

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Men and Women and Thoughts of Divorce: Different Planets? Part 3

To this series of posts I’ve made on differences (or the lack thereof) between men and women in romantic relationships and marriage, I want to add a finding from a study we conducted in our lab at the University of Denver. In 2002, we published a study based on a national survey, in which we presented analyses on all sorts of dynamics in marriage, including about commitment, communication, and conflict (Stanley, Markman, & Whitton, 2002). One of the analyses we conducted looked at the associations between thinking about divorce and ratings of either global positivity or ratings of negativity. Global positivity included ratings of satisfaction, sensual connection, talking as friends, and having fun with one’s mate. Negativity was measured by what we call Communication Danger Signs, including the tendency to escalate when arguments break out, using put downs, feeling one’s partner sees your motives more negatively than they are, and the degree to which one or both partners pull away during conflicts. You could think of the positivity measure as reflecting the overall quality of connection and the negativity measure as reflecting the level of conflict and hassled in the relationship.

What we found was a pretty strong difference in men and women on what was most strongly linked to thoughts of divorce. Take a moment and guess which way this went. I bet you can do it.

We found that, for women, ratings on positive connection explained twice as much variance in thinking about divorce as did negativity. For men, it was just the opposite, with negativity explaining almost four times as much variance in thinking about divorce than positivity. To put that more simply: Thinking about leaving one’s marriage was associated more with an absence of positive connection for women and the presence of negative interaction for men.

Men start to wonder if it’s going to work out when there are a lot of hassles and negatives with their mates. Women start to wonder if it’s going to work out when there is the absence of positives with their mates. Does that seem like different planets? In a way it does, because this type of finding (and there are others like it) suggest that men and women have--at least historically--looked for something different in what they want most to feel their marriages are working out.

The sample from the study we published in 2002 is from the mid 1990s. It’s quite possible that we’d get a different result today. (And, we may examine this type of association again soon in a much more recent sample of unmarried individuals in serious, romantic relationships.) If you’d like to think in terms of one planet, the overall conclusion you could make is straightforward: Marriages thrive when there is both solid positive connections and lower levels of negative interaction. It’s worth thinking about how you can move both in the right direction in your own relationship, regardless of if the two of you fit any stereotype or not. After all, you live in the same zip code regardless of what planet you are on.

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Men and Women: Different Planets or Not? Part 2

Picking up (finally!) from my last post, let’s recap: Bobbi Carothers and Harry Reis recently published a paper that got wide attention, with the headlines mostly suggesting that men and women are pretty much the same in relationships. They used some very sophisticated research strategies to examine many commonly assumed differences between men and women, finding that many of these differences do exist but that they are not so much differences in type as degree. (Please see the last post for more details on the study and it’s basic meaning.) As I said before, for many dimensions, the differences do not amount to different planets but, more, different zip codes.

The work done by Carothers and Reis is very good, and the main theme people took from it is correct: We often over-assume differences between men and women in a number of areas where there is actually very little difference—perhaps some consistent but small, average differences. That means you’d misunderstand scads of people (technical term for big lots) if you just went with the stereotype. The fact that people over-believe in these differences is something to think seriously about.

Here’s a practical suggestion, especially if you have not been with and known your partner well, for a long time: If you make too strong an assumption about your partner’s interests or tendencies based on knowing his or her gender, you may be wrong a good deal of the time. Furthermore, your expectations can become part of a negative pattern that locks your partner into a stereotype rather than letting him or her be who they truly are around you. It’s far better to pay attention to who your partner actually is than to make assumptions based on gender. Talk, listen, and notice what he or she cares about or how he or she behaves. See the person who is really there, not just a stereotype.

Having made this important point, I am now going to remark about the evidence for some stereotypes when it comes to sex differences. I do not mean to argue for any stereotypes where they are unhelpful or wrong, but I do want to suggest that some writers overplayed the meaning of the findings from the study by Carothers and Reis. I will give two examples of where the there is good evidence of something stereotypical going on, based on their work. Then, in the next post, I will give an important example from research in our lab.

Carothers and Reis noted that there were clear differences in type, not just degree, when it came to activities people liked. I mentioned this last time but I’ll repeat and add to the list of activities where males and females differed in their reports of what they like to do: playing video games, golf, scrapbooking, interest in cosmetics, tuning into talk shows, watching boxing, talking on the phone, and so forth. If you take an average couple with two partners who have been together over many years (or plan to be) some of these types of sex differences can become important. In most relationships, two partners share important interests and activities; but in other relationships, couples struggles to find interests that overlap. If a male and female partner were quite stereotypical in line with the findings just noted, such a couple might struggle to find shared interests. So, while men and women may be similar in desire for intimacy, there are types of activities where men and women are less likely to have overlapping interests in ways that are both stereotypical and problematic for some couples. Of course, even for couples with few overlapping interests, some couples will have one interest or two that does overlap from which the two partners can derive a lot of connection. Anyway, it not far-fetched to see how some of these types of differences support some of the widely held beliefs about how different men and women can be in marriage.

Carothers and Reis also found more differences between men and women in a couple of areas where people expect sex differences about, well, sex. In the category of activities noted above, where differences where more of type than merely degree, watching pornography was one of the activities wherein men and women were not alike. Obviously, men are far more likely to report having watched or regularly using pornography. Plenty of studies confirm this—as if you needed any convincing. Pretty different planets, there. In fact, you could say that men are more prone than women to explore different planets in this regard. And that point is supported by the next point, as well.

Carothers and Reis also found a more subtle, but important difference related to sexual behavior. They analyzed the degree to which men and women reported that various behaviors would appeal to them: having sex without love, having sex with more than one partner, or having sex with a stranger. While they found men and women differed, here like other areas, more in degree than type, but the degree of difference was pretty large and what you’d expect. Similarly, they looked at those who rated themselves higher on things like expecting to have more sexual partners in the coming years or fantasizing about being with someone other than one’s partner or comfort with casual sex without emotional closeness. Again, there was substantial evidence of differences between men and women, in fact, some of the evidence here suggested a difference in type as well as degree. Half or more of the men and most of the women scored low on such items, but if someone scored higher, you’d do well to bet it was a man—if you were a betting person. (Seems like they should have casinos where people could place bets on social science study findings! That would be amazing, right?) In other words, Carothers and Reis found evidence that those who had the most positive attitudes about casual sex and uncommitted sex were most consistently likely to be men. 

Again, if you think about the news the study received, it sounded from headlines like there was just not much difference between men and women, but that’s not really the case. In some areas where people tend to believe the strongest stereotypes, there actually were substantial differences found that fit what most people believe. Yes, men and women were more similar in type on a host of dimensions, but some differences found that were relatively clear fit what most people would guess when it comes to men and women.

I’ve tried to convey just how complex the analyses are that were conducted by Carothers and Reis. Even where some of the differences were strongly similar to stereotypes about sex, they do find that differences are more often a matter of degree than type. So even where there may not be evidence for different planets, there is something stereotypical going on regarding some types of sexual behavior. As Carothers and Reis note, those differences are consistent with a lot of what we know about differences that are based, fundamentally, in biology. As I often have said, you can disregard sex differences if you want, but the fact that females can become pregnant and males cannot (along with everything that relates to this fact) drives a lot of differences in how men and women behave when it comes to love, sex, and commitment. Men and women may be more similar, psychologically, than many would like to believe, but there are also differences that consistently matter.

That’s all pretty complex but interesting to think about. Let’s get more practical for a moment. Here’s my advice for you. Don’t over-assume things to be true based on someone’s gender. It is especially important to watch out for doing this in your relationship with your partner as well as in work relationships, where you can also put people boxes that do not fit and are not fair. On the other hand, I think it’s important to realize the limitations of how the important study by Carothers and Reis was discussed in the media. They actually found some pretty strong differences between men and women that are quite consistent with stereotypes, but that sure did not come across in any of the headlines. These types of differences may not represent living on different planets, but frustrations related to them can sure send some people into orbit. 

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Men and Women: Different Planets or Not? Part 1

When it comes to love, or most things in life, are most men and women really just from Earth and not on different planets? Bobbi Carothers and Harry Reis recently published a (great) paper on this subject in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. You can find the abstract for this paper online, here. Many media stories were appropriately nuanced though, I must say, judging from my reading of tweets and various news accounts, other outlets did overplay the idea that there are no differences between men and women. Here are a few examples of some of the solid media stories on their research.  (Here and Here and There).

Carothers and Reis did something different from what has been done before. They conducted a variety of complex statistical procedures to examine if differences between men and women that are commonly assumed to exist (and often found) were more a matter of degree or of type.  That’s a pretty interesting way to study this.

One of the links above is for an example in a Huffington Post piece by Emma Gray (the first of the three links to other stories above). She presents very nice graphs of differences in men and women on physical strength versus assertiveness. You can see the type of thing that Carothers and Reis were studying very nicely in those graphs. On physical strength, there is a clear, distinct, difference between men and women—different types. In contrast, on assertiveness, there is a messy, complicated pattern that reflects more of a difference that is an uneven matter of degree. Strength: different planets. Assertiveness: different zip codes, and pretty much coed living zones at that.

Here’s a way to think about some of their findings. Let’s say you have a new job at a mall. You have been put in charge of directing people to the restroom when they ask where it is. But you only get to know one piece of information about a person to tell them where to go when they need to go. You do not get to see or hear the person needing direction. You just know one small piece of information. It’s really a strange job, but in these times, you hang onto what you can.

Okay, on day one of your new job, you get to know how physically strong a person is before you decide which way to send him or her. In your awesomeness, you send most people to the right restroom. You miss some, but you are mostly on a roll. On the next day, you only get to know the scores of people on a little paper and pencil test of assertiveness. Therefore, you only really know how assertive each person thinks he or she is. It’s a much harder day and you do pretty poorly. In fact, you send people to the wrong restroom 45% of the time. Ouch. There are complaints. But you have renewed hope about the third day because, on the third day, you will get to know how much people say they love to have just sit and talk with their best friends before deciding which restroom to send them off to use. It will be a better day.

The strength difference really works more like a difference in type. An individual’s level of assertiveness is just not very informative about if they are a male or a female.

Carothers and Reis refer to differences as either dimensional or taxonic. If it’s dimensional, it’s something men and women may have an average difference but they are not in different planetary orbits. When things are dimensional (as in one dimensional), there might be a difference with males or females tending to score higher or lower, but the overlap in the range of scores is so great that you are better off learning who the individual is than making any assumptions based on knowing their sex.

What did Carothers and Reis find? Here’s a summary. They write:

Although gender differences on average are not under dispute, the idea of consistently and inflexibly gender-typed individuals is. That is, there are not two distinct genders, but instead there are linear gradations of variables associated with sex, such as masculinity or intimacy, all of which are continuous (like most social, psychological, and individual difference variables).

Carothers and Reis found that the evidence suggests men and women live on the same planet when it comes to variables such as the following:

Masculinity/Femininity (measured on questionnaires about attitudes)     

Fear of Success                                            

Science Inclination                                     

Personality traits                                        

Centrality of concepts like caring, trust, support to what one thinks love is

Sexual attitudes and behaviors

Keep in mind they are not saying there are no differences between men and women on these dimensions, just that the differences were not really differences in type. They also were not studying everything. For example, their paper does not discuss other dimensions such as abilities in math, languages, science, etc. There are other whole literatures on those types of variables (and most are dimensional as well, even though these sophisticated types of analyses have maybe not been done on those dimensions yet.)

How about Taxons? What variables did they find evidence of planetary differences?

Physical Strength (as noted above)

Anthropometric measurements

Sex-stereotyped Activities

In that latter category, questions were asked about enjoyment of things such as playing golf, boxing, construction, watching pornography, scrapbooking, beauty design, watching talk shows.  You get the idea. Yes, men and women seemed categorically different in their interests in these things—and I bet you can pretty directly guess how those differences played out.

Next time, I will talk more about two of the categories above: (1) sexual attitudes and behaviors and (2) sex-stereotypes activities. The findings were more nuanced than my simple summary here suggests on the first of these, and the findings were more gendered than many media stories suggested, based on the latter.  More to come.   

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