CNN has a story today that reports that more and more women are marrying down the social ladder. Stephanie Chen points out that this phenomenon is rooted in the fact that women are more and more likely to outperform men in the educational arena and, increasingly, in the labor force. The story paints a largely rose-colored picture of this phenomenon.

But nowhere does the story provide any evidence that these marriages are (a) typically happy or (b) typically stable. By contrast, my own research, featured in the 2009 State of Our Unions report on money & marriage, indicates that couples are more vulnerable to unhappiness and divorce when the wife outperforms her husband in the labor force. And this trend is likely to rise as more women have to marry down.

Categories: Marriage, Marriage and Money

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