The Marriage Strengthening Research & Dissemination Center (MAST) recently released a new research brief, “Trends in Relationship Formation and Stability in the United States: Dating, Cohabitation, Marriage, and Divorce.” Co-authored by CCF expert Dr. Karen Benjamin Guzzo, the brief is the first in a series aiming to provide an overview of the current state of research on romantic relationships.
Singles & Dating
CCF’s Kristi Williams on WHYY Philadelphia
Listen here to see what CCF President of the Board Kristi Williams had to say about romantic love and the modern American marriage on WHYY Philadelphia’s “Solitude and the creative life”.
Link: https://whyy.org/episodes/solitude-and-the-creative-life/
National Spouses Day Is This Sunday…. Feeling Any Pressure?
January 23, 2020
A fact sheet on prospects for marriage in contemporary America prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Daniel L. Carlson, University of Utah, and Stephanie Coontz, The Evergreen State College
January 26 is National Spouses Day, and Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. If you’re looking for a spouse — or hoping to become a better one — here are a few things you might want to know, including why you shouldn’t panic if no one is on the horizon.
Get a College Education
- As late as 1970 more than 80% of US women age 40-45 were married, with few differences by education but a slight advantage for women with a high school degree. In the last two decades, however, a different and much larger educational marriage gap has emerged. As of 2014, 75% of women aged 40-45 with a Bachelor’s degree or more were currently married, compared to only 65% of those with some college, 59% of women with a high school diploma, and just 56% of women who had not completed high school.
- In the 20th century, women with PhDs or professional degrees were the least likely women to marry. Today, women with such advanced degrees are the MOST likely to marry. More than 80% of women age 40-45 with professional degrees or PhDs were married in 2014.
- A college education is especiallyprotective against divorce. The Pew Research Center reports that as of 2015, college-educated women had an 80% chance of their marriage lasting more than 20 years. For women with a high school education or less, the chance of a marriage lasting that long is only 40%.
Take Your Time
- In 2018 the average age of marriage reached an all-time high of 30 years for men and 28 for women.
- But these averages reflect far greater variation in the chance of marriage AFTER age 30 than in the past. Sociologist Philip Cohen estimates that 85 percent of White women and 78 percent of Black women will marry in the course of their lives. Although Black women marry later than White women until their early thirties, they marry at higher rates after that age. In fact, Cohen calculates that a White woman who reaches age 45 without marrying has a 26 percent chance of marrying at some later point, while a Black woman still single at 45 has a 49 percent chance of marrying.
- And almost every year a woman postpones marriage, up to about age 49, lowers her chance of divorce.
Get by with a little help from…the internet?
- The most common way heterosexual adults met their future marital partners in the latter half of the 20th century was through friends. However, after peaking at 35% in 1990, the percent of heterosexual adults who met their partner through friends had fallen to 20% by 2017. Meanwhile, the number of adults who met their partners online had soared to nearly 40%, up from just 1% in 1995. For heterosexuals, the internet is now the most common way of meeting a marital partner. Bars and restaurants are the second most common place to meet a partner, with 27% reporting they met their partner there, up from 19% in 1990. Yet most of these initial in-person meet ups were actually precipitated by online connections, making the number of couples who owe their start to online dating even greater! Heterosexuals who meet on line tend to enter marriage more quickly than their counterparts who meet in other ways, but they do not have a higher risk of breakup.
Don’t be afraid to buck outdated rules
- As of 2016, one in ten marriages involved partners of different racial/ethnic backgrounds, a more than three-fold increase from 1980. Among newlyweds, approximately one in six is married to someone of a different race or ethnicity. Many researchers believe these trends reflect an erosion of the traditionally rigid boundaries between different faith communities and racial-ethnic groups.
- In the past, marriages where women had higher education or higher earnings than their husband had an elevated chance of divorce. But in recent decades women’s advancements in education and the work force have ceased to threaten marital stability. Couples where men and women are educational equals are the least likely to divorce and those in which women are more educated than their male partners are no more likely to divorce than those where the man is more educated than the woman. Since the 1990s, couples where women earn as much or more than their husbands no longer have a higher risk for divorce.
When making marital wishes, don’t forget the nightly dishes
- It turns out the best predictor of a happy marriage is not how good-looking, talented or rich your spouse is, but how much you share – in your conversations, your interests, and especially the daily routines of life, such as housework. Gender egalitarian and same-sex couples have some big advantages here, since they tend to share more equally. Sharing housework and childcare, especially, is associated with greater relationship quality – including more satisfying and frequent sex. But have a conversation about who is going to do what, because when it comes to sharing housework, some tasks matter more than others. If you’re a woman in a heterosexual relationship and your partner won’t share the dishwashing, this could mean your relationship is headed in the wrong direction. 41% of women who do the majority of dishes say their relationship is in trouble, compared to just 20% of those who share dishwashing equally. Meanwhile, men are three times more satisfied with their relationships when their partner trusts their judgment enough to share the shopping.
- Talk it out. For women who want their partner to share responsibilities for domestic labor, communication is key. Men who report higher quality communication with their partner are more likely to do an equal share of housework and childcare.
And always remember, single doesn’t mean second-best
- Only 16% of men and 17% of women say that having a spouse is essential to their fulfillment. What IS essential for a fulfilling life, according to57% of men and 46% of women, is having an enjoyable job or career.
- Once you have an education and a secure income, you do have a better chance of getting married. But you also have a better chance of enjoying health, happiness, and a wide range of friendship networks if you stay single. In fact, at the highest income levels, never-married individuals actually report more supportive friendship networks then their married counterparts. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X1630789X
- This is an important advantage, because having supportive and numerous friendships is a stronger predictor of mental and physical health than being married or living with a partner.
Daniel L. Carlson is Assistant Professor, Department of Family and Consumer Studies, at the University of Utah, and a Board Member of the Council on Contemporary Families
daniel.carlson@fcs.utah.edu; 614-286-4104.
Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA and is Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families.
coontzs@msn.com; 360 556-9223.
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The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions.
Follow us! @CCF_Families and https://www.facebook.com/contemporaryfamilies
Read our blog Families as They Really Are – https://thesocietypages.org/families/
Defining Consent Symposium
CCF PRESS ADVISORY: How Can Colleges Define Consent and Reduce Unwanted Sex? No easy answers here.
Virginia Rutter
KEYNOTE: No Easy Answers: Can Colleges Define Consent and
Reduce Unwanted Sex?
Stephanie Coontz and Paula England
What’s New About Consent
Rebecca L. Davis
Sex and Consent on Campus: Definitions, Dilemmas, and New Directions
Deborah L. Rhode
Defining Sexual Consent on Campus: Media vs. Policies
Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Sandra Levitsky, Kamaria Porter,
Miriam Gleckman-Krut, Elizabeth Chase, and Jessica Garrick
“Consensualish” – Let’s talk about sex that people don’t want but “go along” with it
Jessie V. Ford
A Restorative Justice Approach to Campus Sexual Misconduct
David Karp
The Social Production of Campus Sexual Assault
Jennifer S. Hirsch & Shamus Khan
CCF’s Kuperberg and Walker Publish New Research on College Hookups
New research by CCF Board Member, Arielle Kuperberg, published with CCF Member Alicia Walker in the Archives of Sexual Behavior examines heterosexual college students who hook up with same-sex partners. This research, featured in Marie Claire, finds that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 8.5 men in college whose most recent hookup was with a same-sex partner identify as straight. Kuperberg and Walker also find many differences in the characteristics of these students compared to students who identify as homosexual or bisexual.
According to Kuperberg, “There was a big disconnect between what people said their sexual orientation was and what their actions were.” This could be because students are experimenting and exploring their sexuality or because they face social pressures to identify as straight. Attention to these nuances is important for researchers and clinicians.
The Date’s not Dead after all: New Findings on Hooking Up, Dating and Romantic Relationships in College
A Briefing Paper Prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Arielle Kuperberg, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Sociology, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and
Joseph E. Padgett, M.A., Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, University of South Carolina
February 11, 2016
For more than 100 years, Valentine’s Day has been a time for romantic candlelit dinner dates. But today, many observers worry, romance and courtship are falling out of favor. According to the New York Times, “traditional dating in college has mostly gone the way of the landline, replaced by ‘hooking up.'” With women outnumbering men on most college campuses, we are told, women can’t attain the long-term relationships they really want, because there aren’t enough men to go around. Men, “as the minority, hold more power in the sexual marketplace,” and they use it to promote a culture of casual sex on campus. Instead of going out on dates, young adults are supposedly meeting up at their homes to “Netflix and chill” or hooking up at big parties, then moving on to the next in a long series of casual sex partners. This is said to harm their chance of entering long-term romantic partnerships.
How accurate is this picture? We recently analyzed a survey of over 24,000 college students, collected at 22 colleges and universities around the United States between 2005 and 2011, and found that reports of the death of dating are greatly exaggerated. College students have essentially equal rates of hooking up and dating. Since beginning college, approximately 62 percent reported having hooked up, while 61 percent said they had gone out on a date. Only 8 percent of all students had hooked up without ever going on a date or being in a long-term relationship. More than 3 times as many students – 26.5 percent — had never hooked up at all, but instead had dated and/or formed a long-term relationship. So while it is clear that hookups are widespread, they have certainly not replaced the traditional date.
Men’s rate of hooking up was 3.5 percentage points higher than women’s – a difference that is statistically significant but very small. However this was not necessarily because men preferred more casual relationships. In fact, 71 percent of the men, compared to just 67 percent of the women, said they wished they had more opportunities to find a long-term romantic relationship. And almost two-thirds of the men expressed the desire for more chances to date, compared to less then half who reported wishing they had more chances to hookup.
The idea that men are leveraging their scarce presence on campus to avoid long-term relationships and force women to settle for unsatisfactory hookups is also called into question by a number of other findings in the survey. Women were not substantially more likely than men to regret their last hookup; only 14.5 percent of women, versus 12.5 percent of men, regretted their last hookup. Overall a similar number of men (48 percent) and women (45 percent) instead reported being glad about their most recent hookup encounter (the rest were neither glad nor regretful). Other recent research finds that even though men are more likely than women to have an orgasm during hookup sex, men and women are almost equally likely to report enjoying their most recent hookup. Our research also revealed that on campuses with a higher proportion of women, women were not more likely to hookup with men or less likely to form long-term relationships with them. They were instead more likely to have dated other women.
While hookups certainly do not carry the expectation of a lasting commitment, many do in fact lead to one. A recent report found that one-third of recent marriages that they studied began in a hook-up context. And despite the prevalence of hookups during their college years, female college graduates are in the long run more like to marry than women with less education. Since women now earn more degrees than men, this means that many marriages are between a woman and a less educated husband, but contrary to widespread concerns, recent research finds this is no longer a risk factor for divorce.
Our survey did find some problematic behaviors associated with many college hookups. A full half of all men and 46.5 percent of women reported engaging in binge drinking (defined as 4 or more drinks for women and 5 or more for men) during or right before the hookup. Students who were binge drinking (male as well as female) faced a higher risk of sexual assault. And even when sex was consensual, each additional drink during or right before a hookup was associated with lower sexual enjoyment from the hookup for both men and women. Other recent research confirms that women in particular are more likely to feel discontented with their hookups when they drink beforehand. In fact, 31 percent of women and 28 percent of men report they would not have hooked up with the partner at all had they not been drinking.
Most students who described themselves as having ‘hooked up’ either didn’t have sex during their last hookup or used a condom when they did. Overall, 42 percent of hookups included vaginal or anal sex. Of these, only 13.3 percent included unprotected vaginal or anal sex. In other words a majority of hookups did not end with sex, and more than two-thirds of students who did have sex during hookups used a condom. Students who had sex on dates also used condoms two-thirds of the time, but since only 22 percent of dates included sex, that meant that only 7 percent of all dates included unprotected sex. So the chance of having unprotected sex was almost twice as high in a hookup as on a date.
Students who were intoxicated were more likely to have unprotected sex during a hookup. Binge drinking increased the likelihood that students would have unprotected sex during their hookup by around one-third, and using marijuana during a hookup (which 11 percent of students reported) was associated with nearly double the risk of unprotected sex.
Surprisingly, truly casual hookups tended to be safer than others. Women who reported knowing their partner ‘very well’ were almost 60 percent more likely to have unprotected sex during a hookup, despite not having an exclusive relationship with that partner, than women who only knew their partner ‘somewhat. ‘ When students had repeated hookups with the same non-exclusive partner, they were more likely to have unprotected sex in later hookups; each additional hookup with the same partner increased the risk of unprotected sex by 17 percent. These students may feel a false sense of security with that partner, leading them to take unnecessary risks. Also, women may worry that asking their partner to use a condom would be seen as mistrustful and, as a result, avoid the issue when hooking up with a friend or otherwise well-known partner.
Hookups were most common among fraternity and sorority members, who were more than twice as likely as non-members to have hooked up but were no more likely to form a long term relationship while in college, despite the fact that sorority members were about 50 percent more likely than non-members to want more opportunities to form long-term relationships in college, and not more likely to want hookup opportunities. Fraternity and sorority members were also both about 50 percent more likely to binge drink while hooking up compared to non-members. On the other hand, sorority members were less likely than other college women to report unprotected sex during their last hookup.
Religious service attendance was also related to whether or not students hooked up, but in distinct patterns for men and women. Women who attended religious services at least once a month were significantly less likely than women who attended services less frequently or never attended services to have ever hooked up in college, and when they did hookup they were less likely to have unprotected sex, or any sex.
For men, a different pattern emerged. Men who attended services a few times per year but less than once per month were the most likely to have either hooked up or dated in college – more likely than men who never attended services. And college men who attended services most frequently – at least once a month – had hookup rates similar to those who never attended. Religious service attendance also had no impact on the likelihood of a man engaging in unprotected sex during hookups. Religious standards of sexual morality seem to constrain the behavior of very religious women; men, on the other hand, may be using religious social networks to find casual sex partners, counteracting any suppressing effect religious doctrine may have on casual sex.
Three groups stood out as having significantly lower rates of unprotected sex during hookups compared to other students: men hooking up with men, women who were members of sororities, and students who met hookup partners in dormitories. What do these groups have in common? Each has been the target of accurate, non-judgmental public health and sexual education campaigns.
Spreading accurate information about risks related to binge drinking during hookups and emphasizing clear, honest communication with partners about condom use, even with trusted partners, could mitigate the many risk factors found in our research. In the absence of these risk factors, hooking up does not appear to have the bad results that are often attributed to it. Rather than panicking about the death of romance on campus, accepting hooking up as part of the normal campus scene while educating about the specific behaviors that make it risky or unpleasant can more effectively protect college youth.
Arielle Kuperberg is Assistant Professor of Sociology, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro Joseph E. Padgett, is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, University of South Carolina
Contact Dr. Kuperberg at atkuperb@uncg.edu; 201-681-2382
Research discussed in this report appears in:
Kuperberg, Arielle and Joseph E. Padgett. Forthcoming. “Partner Meeting Contexts and Risky Activity During College Students’ Other-Sex and Same-Sex hookups.” The Journal of Sex Research.
Kuperberg, Arielle and Joseph E. Padgett. 2015. “The Role of Culture in Explaining College Student’s Selection into Hookups, Dates, and Long-term Romantic Relationships.”Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Published Online in Advance of Print.
Kuperberg, Arielle and Joseph E. Padgett. 2015. “Dating and Hooking Up In College: Meeting Contexts, Sex, and Variation by Gender,Partner’s Gender and Class Standing.” The Journal of Sex Research, 52(5): 517-531.
