Couple Longevity in the Era of Same‐Sex Marriage in the United States

Abstract

The author used a new longitudinal data set, the How Couples Meet and Stay Together surveys (N = 3,009) Among heterosexual couples, marriage has long been associated with couple stability. Because same-sex couples have only recently won government recognition for their marriages in the United States and elsewhere, less is known about

A reflection on the changing dynamics of union formation and dissolution

“…Among unions in the United States, however, both Rosenfeld (2014) and Ketcham and Bennett (2016) find that while female same-sex marriages are significantly less stable than opposite-sex marriages, the stability of male same-sex marriages is statistically no different from that of their opposite-sex counterparts.…”

“…In Figure 3 we see that in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the United States, female same-sex unions appear to be substantially less stable than male same-sex unions, with relative risk ratios of 1.5, 1.7, 2.2, and 2.1, respectively (Andersson and Noack 2010;Andersson et al 2006;Rosenfeld 2014;and Wiik, Seierstad, and Noack 2014).…”

“…It is worth mentioning one additional way in which these two types of union resemble each other. In the How Couples Meet and Stay Together surveys, 3,009 couples in the United States were randomly selected in 2009, with an oversampling of same-sex couples (Rosenfeld 2014). They were followed in several waves thereafter.…”

Marriage, Choice, and Couplehood in the Age of the Internet

“…For unmarried couples, breakup rate is much higher in the early stages of the relationship; the rate of breakup was more than 60 percent for unmarried couples who had been together for less than a year (Rosenfeld 2014), meaning the breakups would have been distributed more in the beginning of the year than in the end of the year between wave 1 and wave 2. To accommodate the front-loading of breakups of nonmarital unions in the period between wave 1 and wave 2, I used the following function: M b = (M e )r ( 2+rd 1+rd ) , where M b is the allocated month of breakup after wave 1, M e is the number of months elapsed between wave 1 and wave 2, r is a random uniform number between zero and 1, and rd is relationship duration in years.…”

“…Of these 2,669 partnered subjects, 1,341 met their partners in the Internet era or after, which I operationalize as 1995 or later because graphical web browsers were first introduced in 1994 and 1995, and couples first started to meet online around 1995 (Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012). I analyze transitions to marriage only for heterosexual (i.e., different sex) couples because same-sex couples did not have access to legal marriage in most of the states and periods under study and because even informal marriage among same-sex couples was historically constrained by the lack of legal marriage as an option (Rosenfeld 2014). The prospective data set is a couple-month data set because survey dates are specific to each month.…”