In a new working paper published by the Census Bureau, researchers Marta Murray-Close and Misty L. Heggeness found that in marriages in which the woman is the primary breadwinner, both husbands and wives are uncomfortable enough with their circumstances to fudge the numbers and suggest the gap is smaller than it actually is.
The question is why.
Over at the New York Times, Claire Cain Miller offers the same tired response we always hear when data of this nature are published: that the reason for the discomfort is likely due to men being threatened when their wife's success is greater than theirs.
That may be true in some cases, but it is not true in most. There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why such an arrangement can cause problems.
To be clear, there are certainly some couples that make a role reversal work. But full-on role reversal typically upends a marriage's equilibrium, particularly once children come along. Children elicit a biological component to the relationship, one that may have been barely visible before.
“It seems to me there’s a blindness to childbearing in gender role statistical analyses,” notes “htg” in a comment response to The New York Times article. “The simple truth is that I, or any other man, will never be able to grow a human fetus…Taken to the extreme, the [admittedly somewhat harsh] logic goes like this: the wife will always have a role as the incubator, food supply, and instinctual caretaker; but if the husband isn't feeding and sheltering the family, then he has no other role and should be discarded. That is not how I or my wife live our lives. We have both been stay-at-home parents at various points of our life, both are active parents, and both are now earning decent money. But despite our marital equality, we also have honest discussions about how the biological differences between men and women have shaped our relationship. After you have lived through pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and maternal instincts, they are impossible to ignore.”
Indeed they are.
I always describe it like this: Women are able to do something no man can: give birth. Their bodies also provide the sustenance a baby needs to survive. What on earth can top that? Nothing — it’s miraculous. And men don’t have this power.
I’m not suggesting men secretly long to give birth and breastfeed. I’m saying a man’s ability to provide for the child he helped create is vital to his manhood. That’s something he absolutely can do.
Unfortunately, whenever the subject of gender role reversal comes up, all the media does is lament Americans’ supposedly archaic attitudes. “Certain gender attitudes, at least about women, seem to be slowly catching up with people’s behavior,” writes Miller.
But it isn’t people’s attitudes that are slow to catch up. As Miller herself notes, “Age and geography did not make a difference — couples in which the woman earned more were as common in liberal cities as in the conservative South.”
It’s human nature with which couples must contend. When husbands and wives fight against the evolutionary tide, they almost always have conflict. When they move with the tide, they don't.
We must stop pointing the finger at husbands as if they’re somehow cavemen. Even women with feminist attitudes prefer a conventional arrangement to an egalitarian one! That’s because study after study has shown that for most couples, something goes awry when women earn more than their husbands.
“So in 2013, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business published a paper that looked at 4,000 married couples in America,” Mona Chalabi noted on NPR. “It found that once a woman started to earn more than her husband, divorce rates increased. Surprisingly, though, this data showed that whether the wife earns a little bit more or a lot more doesn't actually make much of a difference. So the researchers concluded from that that what really matters is the mere fact of a woman earning more.”
Even if the couple doesn’t get divorced, the sex can, and often does, wane. “The very qualities that lead to greater emotional satisfaction in peer marriages, as one sociologist calls them, may be having an unexpectedly negative impact on these couples’ sex lives,” notes Lori Gottleib in "Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex?"
That might may sound blasphemous in today’s day and age, what with our insistence on so-called equality. But the fact remains that sexual attraction tends to be strongest when men and women are distinct from, not similar to, one another.
“The more traditional the division of labor,” adds Gottleib, “meaning the greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s reported sexual satisfaction.”
None of this is to suggest couples must live like Ward and June Cleaver to be happy. It is simply to say we should not be afraid of data that highlights the unique sexual psychologies of women and men. They are not equal to one another biologically; thus, they can’t possibly behave in the same manner and expect the same results.
On the contrary, it’s our sex differences, our sexual inequality, that makes marriage work. Ergo, it seems to me we should be celebrating, not countermanding, research that confirms this truth.
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