In 2003, when Benjamin Karney, PhD, started asking heterosexual newlyweds to estimate the chances that they would still be married in three years, nearly all the couples he interviewed were highly optimistic that they would still be happily married. As he followed the couples, Karney found that, in fact, many were significantly less satisfied with their relationships and some had even divorced after three years. As he pored over psychology research aimed at helping partners navigate the difficulties of maintaining intimacy, he noticed that most studies had been conducted with White, middle-class participants. The interventions informed by that work focused on improving communication between spouses who likely had enough financial stability and discretionary time to prioritize their relationship, but Karney wondered whether these interventions would be effective for couples with lower incomes.
“Psychologists had studied many variables that affect marriage outcomes, but not socioeconomic status,” says Karney, who codirects the Marriage and Close Relationships Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Sociologists and demographers know that a college education nearly doubles the survival rate of marriages; now psychologists need to understand why this is true.”
For more than 10 years, Karney’s lab has followed hundreds of ethnically and racially diverse heterosexual married couples with varied income levels. In Los Angeles, he recruited participants living in ZIP codes where the median household income was no more than 160% of the federal poverty level. In Harris County, Texas, he focused on neighborhoods where more than 30% of households had income below the federal poverty level. His team is uncovering the reasons why the traditional approach to improving relationship satisfaction may not work for those who are facing financial challenges. He talked to the Monitor about his findings as well as a strategy that has the potential to help these couples enjoy fulfilling and lasting marriages.
What have you learned from studying married couples?
We have foundopens in new window that couples at all levels of socioeconomic status want more or less the same things from their intimate relationships: passion, closeness, and commitment. The difference between richer and poorer couples is not in what they want, but in their ability to pursue their goals. A studyopens in new window showed that the couples with lower incomes than others in their neighborhood are much more likely to be working nonstandard hours that keep them apart from one another; they struggle with child-care issues and having enough money to cover expenses; substance use is more prevalent in their communities. Essentially, their ability to connect and have a good conversation is hampered by the fact that their circumstances are more likely to be unstable and stressful.
How do those challenges affect communication?
We recently discoveredopens in new window that the communication advice that may seem obvious for middle- or high-income couples can in fact be maladaptive for lower-income couples. For example, one interaction pattern that is traditionally understood to be destructive for relationships is the demand-withdraw pattern. One partner wants change while the other is happy with the status quo and withdraws to avoid making changes. Research on middle-class couples shows that this pattern harms relationships because one partner is not meeting the demand for change even though he or she could do so. But what if a husband or wife could not meet a demand due to external circumstances? Perhaps one partner wants his or her spouse to make more money, but there are no opportunities to increase income. In this case, it might be adaptive to disengage from the conversation rather than focus on an intractable problem. Our research bore this out: When we studied couples with different levels of income, the demand-withdraw pattern was associated with lower satisfaction in more affluent couples but higher satisfaction in lower-income couples.
How has this workopens in new window changed your view of marriage?
One thing I’ve learned is that we know less about the normal course of marriage than we originally thought. For years, researchers believed that the average couple started out happy and over time became less happy. But literature is showing that there are large groups of people who start out happy and stay that way for years. We need to explore how these couples remain satisfied with their relationships, and how even these satisfied couples sometimes divorce. There has also been an assumption that the way partners treat each other will determine marital satisfaction. This is not always true. For couples with fewer material advantages, the partner’s ability to provide for the family, remain employed, care for the children, or refrain from substance use may be just as or even more important than the way they treat one another.
What are the policy implications of your findings?
We may be jumping the gun by trying to teach communication skills to couples who are dealing with much bigger problems related to their socioeconomic status. Perhaps we might help these couples experience more intimacy if we reduced the stress in their lives with programs that address the effects of income inequality directly, such as raising the minimum wage, adjusting the earned income tax credit, or easing access to health care and child care. One of the goals of my lab is to inform discussions among policymakers and encourage them to evaluate the impact of new legislation on marriages and families. When we vote on a law, we read the economic and environmental impact statements, and we should be recognizing the family impact as well.
Are you exploring how this approach could increase relationship happiness?
We are currently studying whether raising the minimum wage affects marriage and divorce rates, and I’m interested in investigating whether states that took advantage of the Affordable Care Act saw a change in marriage outcomes for lower-income couples. Also, for some families, the stimulus checks they received during the COVID-19 pandemic were more than what they lost financially, and this is another opportunity to study the effect of income supports on intimacy.
