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.