MARRIAGE TOO EXPENSIVE IN AMERICA or OUT OF STYLE?

A couple articles have come out about this lately, so here are the links...


WASHINGTON POST/ ECONOMY - MARRIAGE TOO EXPENSIVE  by Michelle Singletary
(I wonder about her surname...)
EXCERPT: The researchers concluded that middle-income families can afford to spend the money to maintain the intimacy of their marriage or deal with troubled children while working-class people are priced out of the institution because they don’t have the money to pay for “therapy, horses, college, and gyms to stay happy together.”


and this one
SLATE - MARRIAGE ONLY MIDDLE CLASS AMERICANS CAN AFFORD  by Amanda Hess
EXCERPT: For their new paper "Intimate Inequalities: Love and Work in a Post-Industrial Landscape," University of Virginia sociologist Sarah Corse and Harvard sociologist Jennifer Silva interviewed 300 working- and middle-class Americans like Cindy, Megan, Earl, and Jan about their work and relationships. They found that as the American workforce and the American marriage have destabilized over the past half-century, marriage has become an increasingly inaccessible option for working-class Americans. While middle-class people like Earl and Jan are throwing money at their intimate relationships to keep them stable, working-class people like Cindy and Megan have been priced out of the institution.