Socioeconomic Status and Intimate Relationships

Abstract

The ways that couples form and manage their intimate relationships at higher and lower levels of socioeconomic status (SES) have been diverging steadily over the past several decades. At higher SES levels, couples postpone marriage and childbirth to invest in education and careers, but they eventually marry at high rates and have relatively low risk for divorce. At lower SES levels, couples are more likely to cohabit and give birth prior to marriage and less likely to marry at all. This review examines how SES comes to be associated with the formation, development, and dissolution of intimate relationships. Overall, research has highlighted how a couple's socioeconomic context facilitates some choices and constrains others, resulting in different capacities for relationship maintenance and different adaptive mating strategies for more and less advantaged couples. A generalizable relationship science requires research that acknowledges these differences and one that recruits, describes, and attends to socioeconomic diversity across couples. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 72 is January 4, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Can Pets Replace Children? The Interaction Effect of Pet Attachment and Subjective Socioeconomic Status on Fertility Intention

“…Moreover, we found that pet attachment was not associated with the fertility intention of individuals with low subjective SES. When people believe that they have lower SES than others, many other external factors, such as the cost of raising children or their parents' expectations instead of their own internal states (i.e., pet attachment), may influence their fertility decisions [36]. Moreover, as a pronatalist society, social norms in the traditional Chinese context encourage people to have more children.…”

“…than objective SES into psychological processes, such as self-perceptions [34], system justification belief [35], and subjective well-being [31]. The psychological orientation approach to SES suggests that perceptions of one's social class rank produce different characteristic patterns of thought, feelings, and behaviors [36,37]. Individuals with a higher level of subjective SES take for granted the resources and opportunities they have; thus, they tend to have a self-focus and expect to maintain control, neglecting the role of contextual constraints on their intention and behavior.…”

When Love Just Ends: An Investigation of the Relationship Between Dysfunctional Behaviors, Attachment Styles, Gender, and Education Shortly After a Relationship Dissolution

“…Several studies hypothesized that people can effectively adjust to a loss when they reorganize their attachment system and no longer take into account the former partner as a “secure base” (Feeney and Monin, 2016 ; Guzmán-González et al, 2019 ; Kluwer et al, 2020 ), but less is known of the initial phases of the adjustment process, in terms of sociodemographic variables and attachment styles (Saffrey and Ehrenberg, 2007 ). Aspects, such as perceived self-efficacy, education, current relationship status, and romantic attachment styles are seen as key factors in the dissolution of a previous romantic involvement (Amato and Previti, 2003 ; Beckmeyer and Jamison, 2020 ; Karney, 2021 ).…”

The longitudinal association between marital and psychological functioning in socioeconomically disadvantaged relationships

“…This change might have been prompted by wives' improvements, underlying the importance of taking a dyadic approach to exploring dynamic change patterns in marital and psychological functioning. As low-income parents experience a lack of emotional support systems outside marriage (e., Karney, 2021), feeling happier with the marriage over time might be critical to reducing feelings of psychological distress for both spouses. Overall, these findings contribute to a robust literature outlining the intrinsic link between marital and individual functioning (Proulx et al, 2007).…”