Highlights
- The most successful couples I have treated are the ones in which the spouses aren’t afraid of embracing both the differences between and the equality of the sexes. Post This
- It’s neither possible nor desirable to revert to a world in which women lack choices and men don’t respect women’s accomplishments and ambition. Post This
- It’s crucial for couples to respect each other’s unique abilities and pay attention to the power balance in the marriage. Post This
As American wives increasingly outearn their husbands, many couples experience what relationship coach Suzanne Venker calls “role-reversal stress.” This stress can be deleterious for their emotional and sexual lives, three studies published in the American Sociological Review suggest:
• Harvard sociologist Alexandra Killewald found that if a husband is employed full-time, the couple has a 2.5% chance of splitting up in the next year; if he isn’t, the likelihood of divorce rises to 3.3%.
• Christin Munsch of the University of Connecticut found that husbands who are economically dependent on their wives have a greater propensity to be unfaithful.
• Three sociologists from the Juan March Institute and the University of Washington found that the frequency of marital sex is lower for couples in which the husband often does traditionally feminine chores such as cooking, cleaning and taking care of kids, and higher if he does masculine ones like yard work, paying bills and car maintenance. Julie Brines told reporters that she and her co-authors were surprised at “how robust the connection was between a traditional division of housework and sexual frequency.”
It seems younger generations are taking note.
Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal . . . .
Erica Komisar, LCSW is a psychoanalyst, parent guidance expert and author of Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters and Chicken Little The Sky Isn’t Falling: Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety. *The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.
