Archives: Marriage and Money

An article from the Telegraph about a fracus over determining who gets the Child Benefit entitlement when nobody can reliably tell who is a couple and who is not. (Are they married? In a civil partnership? If they are among the vast and increasing numbers sporadically ”living together as married,” how does the tax man determine that?)

Benefits staff are told in guidance to consider “duration and stability of the   relationship”, “financial arrangements”, “sexual relations (although a   person should not be asked about this)”, “the degree of interdependence and   devotion” and “how other people see the relationship”.

However they do not use a “score card” or a single factor to decide if two people are in a relationship akin to marriage or civil partnership.

Meanwhile critics charge these questions are “intrusive.”

Asks Brad Wilcox at CNN:

…the problem with the retreat from marriage in poor and working-class communities is that fewer children, not to mention adults (especially men), benefit from the meaning, direction and stability afforded by an intact, family life. Conversely, American adults and children hailing from more educated communities and affluence are more likely to be doubly blessed with high levels of income and education as well as strong and stable families.

There are at least two ways to bridge the growing marriage divide. First, liberals correctly note that one reason marriage is disappearing is that men in poor and working-class communities are having greater difficulty finding stable, decent-paying jobs — particularly as manufacturing jobs head overseas. Our government should aim to strengthen vocational education and job programs in these communities.

Conservatives are also correct to point out that the cultural foundations of marriage have weakened in poor and working-class communities. For instance, since the 1970s, less-educated Americans have become more accommodating of divorce, whereas college-educated Americans have become more intolerant of divorce and are in fact, more likely to embrace what I call a marriage mind-set. more

The drudgery, the beauty:

She and Jeffrey had fallen into silence, the long flight from California behind them, in which they had already conducted the conversation of a busy couple in forced companionship, reviewing the household matters they had had no time for, and managing, in the interest of the long journey still ahead of them, to avoid recriminations and criticism on a variety of touchy subjects—things undone, details of child rearing, delayed decisions about the plumbing. Chloe did not say, though she had often thought, that if only Jeffrey would take the children out on some sort of expedition on Saturday afternoons, she could use the time to do some of the things that needed doing around the house. Jeffrey did not say, as he so often did, that if she were more punctilious about certain housekeeping things then the atmosphere would be generally more harmonious and he’d feel like doing more around the house. Maybe they should go ahead with a new sprinkler system, though in principle Chloe, home in the mornings, could take care of the sprinkling. Sara would finish the school year at her present, even though not wonderful, school. A few other things settled, a few deferred again. Second thoughts—maybe instead of the sprinkler system, the priority thing was the roof.

–Diane Johnson, Persian Nights, pp. 11-12

…the darker possibilities the Christmas stories hint at — divorce, abandonment, childhood suffering — are realities they have to live with every day. But that unhappy knowledge isn’t evenly distributed. In 21st-century America, the well-off and well-educated have the best odds of enjoying the domestic stability that the Yuletide stories celebrate, while the very people who most need resilient families — the Cratchits and Baileys, the working poor and the hard-pressed middle class — are less and less likely to have them.

This domestic dissolution plays a role in a host of socioeconomic ills: stagnating blue-collar wages, weakening upward mobility, stalling high school graduation rates, even the increase in juvenile obesity and diabetes. But it isn’t an issue that politicians of either party are particularly comfortable addressing. Liberals worry about seeming paternalistic and judgmental; conservatives recoil from the idea of increasing the government’s role in the most intimate of spheres. Thus America has a crisis of family life, but no family policy to speak of.  more

And see the State of Our Unions 2011 for more.