Those
arrows aren't hitting their lovelorn targets the way they once did. The
reason? New research points to our growing economic divide.
Finding
true love, philosophers have always understood, can get complicated in
deeply unequal places. Grand fortunes tend to give Cupid a hard time,
on Valentine’s Day and every other.
“If
you gain fame, power, or wealth, you won’t have any trouble finding
lovers,” as social critic Philip Slater noted years ago in The Pursuit of Loneliness, “but they will be people who love fame, power, or wealth.”
But
philosophers no longer have a corner on the love-and-inequality
connection. All sorts of social scientists are now working that
intersection where wealth and romance meet — and they’re uncovering an
assortment of troubling trends.
Researchers are finding,
for instance, that Cupid’s arrows fall less randomly than they did
back in the middle of the 20th century. Americans today have become distinctly less likely to marry someone outside their income bracket.
Social
scientists have a label for this phenomenon. They call it “assortative
mating.” Since 1960, shows new research from the University of
Pennsylvania’s Jeremy Greenwood and colleagues, this assortative
mating has contributed significantly to how unequal we've become.
“The rich marry rich and get richer,” notes Andrea Garcia-Vargas, one commentator on the research, “the poor marry poor and get poorer.”
But the cause and effect here goes both ways. Assortative mating widens the income gaps that divide us. Wider income gaps nurture assortative mating.
Back
in the 1960s, a much more equal time in America, millions of men with
just high school diplomas could count on good union-wage jobs and make
nearly as much, or even more at times, than someone with a college
degree.
In
that more equal nation, most Americans lived within income hailing
distance of most other Americans. They interacted socially with a fairly
large cross-section of the nation's overall population.
Today,
with Americans much more divided by income, those social interactions
across income levels have become considerably rarer. People
increasingly marry in their own income bracket — if they marry at all.
And that brings us to another mating consequence of growing inequality: the ongoing slide in the share of American adults married.
In
1960, 72 percent of Americans over 18 lived the married life. The 2010
share: just 51 percent. Among younger Americans, an even steeper
tumble. Three-fifths of 18- to 29-year-olds had spouses in 1960, only
one-fifth today.
How
to explain this trend? One major factor: the economic squeeze on
working Americans. A half-century ago, a single wage earner could
support a family. No longer. Two earners have become a necessity for
maintaining anything close to a comfortable middle class status.
But
keeping two people together has never been harder. In our ever more
unequal America, jobs have become less secure, workplaces more
stressful. At every turn, the strains on married life multiply.
Affluent couples can more easily overcome this strain, note
sociologists Sarah Corse and Jennifer Silva. Their survey research
paper, “Intimate Inequalities: Love and Work in a Post-Industrial
Landscape,” appeared last year.
Affluents,
Corse and Silva show, can afford the investments necessary to keep
their marriages healthy. They can spend on everything from therapists to
“date nights” and get-away-from-it-all vacations. Couples working at
low-paid labor find such therapy, formal and informal, simply
unaffordable.
America’s top-heavy distribution of income and wealth, the Corse and Silva research details, has left many economically insecure Americans “unable to imagine being able to provide materially and emotionally for others.”
Amid this high-stress reality, adds Atlantic
commentator Nancy Cook, marriage “is fast becoming a luxury good.”
People who can’t afford the investments that help keep marriages
together split and sink from the middle class. The nation becomes a
more unequal — and lonelier — place.
For that loneliness, we pay a heavy price.
“Air pollution increases your chances of dying early by 5 percent, obesity by 20 percent,” as Aditya Chakrabortty observed last fall in the British Guardian. “Excessive loneliness pushes up your odds of an early death by 45 percent.”
Those figures come from neuroscientist John Cacioppo, a veteran researcher on social seclusion. We have, he writes, created “a culture of social isolates, atomized by social and economic upheaval and separated by vast inequalities.”
If we want to find love, in sum, we need to go looking in more equal places.
s it to be inequality or equal opportunity?
