There is no doubt that economics has a huge impact on marriage. Traditionally, we generally assume that a man’s income will be a great deal higher than a woman’s and that such a marriage is more perfect. In reality, is this really the case? In a different social context, perhaps this conclusion does not hold true.
The partner who earns less is more likely to be unfaithful
You may may feel that you deserve the respect and loyalty of your significant other as the breadwinner in your family. However, a recent study proves otherwise: those who are financially dependent on their spouse are more likely to be unfaithful to their significant other than couples with equal income levels.
Study leader Christin Munsch, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut, says that infidelity caused by financial dependence occurs in both men and women, and that Relatively speaking, men show more prominent. This may be because stay-at-home husbands feel their rightful dominance as men is threatened. A conversation between Matthew and a friend gave her the impulse to do this study. It was a male friend of hers who told Matthew about a time when he had been unfaithful to his wife, who was a very financially successful woman.
Matthew analyzed what the friend was really thinking: “He felt that his wife had everything, friends, money, and the glory of success, all because she had a good-paying job and he himself had nothing to do. ”
In the Japanese drama “Daytime,” the marriage between middle school biology teacher Kitano and his own academically glamorous wife ends in divorce.
The reason was that both felt they were taking on too much pressure
To demonstrate whether her friend’s motivation for infidelity was a common occurrence, Matthew collected data from theNationalLongitudinalSurveyofYouth. The survey covered people aged 12-16 years as of December 1996. She chose data from 2001-2011 to ensure that all study participants were 18-32 years old at the time of data collection.
The total number of eligible subjects was 2757, all of whom had been in a heterosexual marriage for at least a year. The survey of them will not explicitly address infidelity, but will be used by Matthew to identify who is cheating based on their answers to two questions.
-Question 1: Have they had sex with a stranger in the past year;
-Question 2: Have they had more than one sexual partner in the past year.
Matthew believes that this approach is not perfect because it would miss some cheaters who were married for less than a year (editor’s note: some couples in the survey would intend to divorce when they had been married for less than a year, but because the divorce process took so long that the actual divorce ), or that some people who are in open relationships are inappropriately classified as cheaters – but, of course, they are a very small minority.
Matthew’s study, published June 1 in AmericanSociologicalReview, found that financial dependency breeds infidelity for both men and women. For example, women who stay at home have a 5% chance of cheating each year, while women who keep their families afloat essentially never cheat.
Same goes for the Japanese drama “Daytime,” where another female lead, Rikako, is a full-time housewife who regularly cheats on her husband, a successful man with a decent job.
Matthew showed that earlier research revealed that women who maintain a household reported taking on more chores than their spouses, compared to women who were financially dependent or financially flat. Likewise, women who maintain their households may avoid infidelity at all costs.
Marriage with income inequality is not satisfying for everyone
For men For men, the relationship between money and cheating is like a skewed U-shaped curve: if they earn much more or less than their significant other, they are more likely to cheat, while men who are in the middle of the pack are much less likely to cheat.
Men who provide all of the household’s financial resources are 5% more likely to cheat each year, while those who don’t have any income are 15% more likely to cheat. The odds of a man cheating drop when the couple’s economic income is equal. Matthew believes that men are least likely to cheat when they contribute 70% of the household income.
In the study, Matthew excluded other external factors that would influence cheating behavior, including the number of hours worked per week, race, age, participation in religious activities, and number of children. She found that the harmony of the marital relationship was not used to explain the odds of cheating.
Apparently, this long-term research approach that Matthew used allowed her to compare changes in behavior over time for the same study participants. She found that men were more likely to cheat in years when the woman contributed more to the household income; and when the man contributed more compared to the woman, they were less likely to cheat. Likewise, the likelihood of women cheating changes with their relative income.
This implies that there is a possible causal relationship between income level and cheating, although Matthew believes that this idea still needs to be argued by more in-depth research. People’s personalities generally don’t change over time, but their likelihood of cheating when they do changes with their income level.
Matthew argues that the study denies the notion that having only one breadwinner in a couple is a perfect state of family life. In fact overall, people are not satisfied with marital relationships with unequal incomes.
She said, “This study shows that both spouses families are more stable when both partners work and contribute to total income.” At the same time, she cautions those interested in entering into marriage to be cautious in making any life-changing decisions in light of the data and research. For one thing, even in the worst case scenario, cheating is relatively rare: most (85 percent) of men in financial dependency situations are also still faithful to their marriages. And this finding applies only to Americans under the age of 32, as they were the primary target of this study.
Matthew repeatedly emphasized that “most men in financial dependency don’t cheat, and most women in financial dependency don’t cheat.” She believes it’s best to worry less about the numbers in your bank account and focus more on fostering a supportive, non-competitive marriage relationship.
She says, “I think it’s important to find someone to marry who feels confident in their gender identity as well as their career. We probably shouldn’t marry someone whose self-identity is based on him/her being better than you.”
A very important aspect of love and marriage is equality and respect. This can be difficult to achieve if incomes are substantially unequal. And a situation where incomes are approximately equal can work out well. What do you think?