Dating and Marriage: A Sociological Overview

[00:00:01]okay sit down and buckle up because we are going to go from the very beginning of a relationship all the way through a marriage and actually to the end of a marriage and so we've got a lot to cover between dating and marriage so I'm going to get started and talk fast as I usually do so the first thing I want to introduce you to is a concept from a theorist named Rhys this is Reese's wheel theory of love so this is the very beginning of getting to know someone and so the first aspect is rapport and that's a feeling of ease with one another that you just think each other are funny or you just hit it off you find yourself talking to each other more more next step is self-revelation and that's when each partner exposes Who I am you start to tell this story is how you grew up in all of those types of things the next step in this kind of in the formation of a relationship so you get to know each other and then mutual dependency is when you begin to rely on each other and feel part of an endured interdependent unit and then finally the moment of a relationship officially starting because up until now rapport self-revelation mutual dependency is like leading up to a relationship intimacy need fulfillment and that's when each partner decides that the relationship fits their needs for closeness and disclosure which means I've decided that I want to be in a relationship with you and so I think this is something that any of us who have met someone and hit it off and gotten to know each other and you know had those hours and hours long conversations and then began to count on getting to talk to each other and finally kind of had the moment of declaring a relationship are familiar with this the reason that it's a wheeeeel theory is because when you think about a wheel a lot of times it gets going with momentum faster and faster and so that is why that is used in this particular idea of how love forms the other kind of love theory I want to show you is Sternberg's triangular theory of love and so you can see here in the middle of that green angles consummate love which is the ultimate in love which includes intimacy passion and commitment you can see intimacy at the top liking and intimacy sometimes we think about physicality but in this instance when we're talking about intimacy we just mean really close like really really good friends passion is when we're talking about being really attracted to each other physically and so you can see that in the bottom left hand corner with the fat infatuation and then commitment so commitment you can see in the bottom right hand corner with empty love when you are committed to each other but you maybe don't have that close friendship that intimacy or that infatuation and the passion then on the sides you can see where there's romantic loves that you are very attracted to each other and you're very close to the friendship but maybe you don't have a commitment this could kind of be things like friends with benefits right on the other side is intimacy so you're very close friends and a commitment to each other but you don't have that attraction to each other you don't have that passion on the bottom that's kind of the hardest one I think in some ways to understand Joshua's love is when you're super attracted and you're committed to each other so really what this is is like love it foresight and really quick dating and getting married right away that you don't have the time to develop that intimacy that close friendship that you jump into commitment right away and then you can see like I said going back to the middle and Sternberg's triangular theory of love says that the ultimate kind of love is consummate love to have the ultimate love you need to have that intimacy of that close friendship you need to have passion which is you know attraction to each other and then you need to have commitment so like I said I'm moving through this quickly but I wanted to kind of show you a couple of different perspectives on relationship formation a lot of times nowadays as relationships progress in our society we don't necessarily go from a serious relationship always straight into marriage we kind of have this other stepping stone that's developed its unofficial by all means but it seems to happen a fair amount and so that is living together cohabitation right and so the definition of cohabitation is a tentative non-legal Co residential Union does not require or imply a lifetime commitment to stay together can you imagine saying to someone like that's how you'd propose living together not propose marriage but purpose you know would you want to live with me injunction saying to someone would you like to enter a tentative non-legal Co residential Union it does not require or imply a lifetime commitment to stay together the reason I want to touch on cohabitation is because a lot of times people don't have a conversation about cohabitation at all it just kind of happens one person is maybe staying over at the other person's house more and more and you kind of fall into it without having a conversation about how this is going to work in my in-person classes when we go through discussing cohabitation I have students in small groups brainstorm the pros and cons of cohabitation and it's funny because it seems like a lot of pros end up being cons and vice versa but what happens with cohabitation is we have this perception that it's kind of um an easier way out the marriage which is true there's not a legality necessarily to it however really thinking about a cohabitating relationship breaking up it's just as devastating and painful and life-altering to undo the makings of a household it's the same as if you were married maybe you have to undo the legalities of marriage but breaking apart that household can be just as excruciating as breaking apart of marriage and so I think what we need to have more and more in our society is more conversations about cohabitation as opposed to just kind of treating it like the thing that a lot of people do but we don't really talk about it we don't really always hold it as a legitimate aspect of life and so there's definitely some repercussions for that okay so let's say we were dating we're in a serious relationship maybe we cohabitated and now we're going to get married see we're moving right along I don't want to keep you so I actually want to play a little bit of a guessing game with weddings and so that you can kind of see what's going on as far as the wedding before we get into marriage and so can you guess and I'll give you just a second and then all bring it up the average wedding budget it's $35,000 nationally in Southern California it's forty-four thousand dollars you imagine the average price of a wedding dress $1,500 students always when I do this in class they like three thousand dollars ten thousand dollars and then it's like in a very affordable fifteen hundred the average age of the bride and groom the bride is 29 the groom is 31 and that has actually gone up over the years I go and update these statistics are coming from the not com but they have done research so it's legitimate it has gone up I believe from 29 when I first started pulling this together for my students for the groom up until age 31 the average number of wedding guests 139 the average number of bridesmaids five that's can you imagine if that's an average I mean some people have a heck of a lot of bridesmaids what is the most popular month to get engaged you think in you think in Valentine's Day yeah you're wrong it's December next time it's Christmastime and you see all those like kiss begins with Kay commercials now you know it's like oh that's why they're pushing it so hard because that's the most popular month to get engaged and then finally what's the average cost of a diamond ring Gavin guesses six thousand one hundred and sixty three dollars mine did not cost that much um and again let's think about the fact that that is an average cost of a diamond ring and so a lot of times the reason I bring all these little details up is a lot of times when we get a you know somehow average six thousand dollar ring and we're immediately submersed in all things wedding and even when you think about the socialization process a lot of times and it's gendered that women are socialized growing up and as they get older to think about how my wedding my wedding my wedding dress might this might not and so what do we really talk about in relationship to marriages we don't talk about that quite in the same way we don't hold that in the same esteem we don't treat it necessarily with the same care and concern and so that's why I kind of like to bring this stuff up is to kind of contrast the fact that the wedding is deemed so important but how important is the marriage which we're about to start talking about and so the thing I want to present to you is a list of aspects of successful marriages and so I believe there are seven different aspects and I'm going to take you through them again pretty quickly so the first one is that people who are married are best friends and I have to admit to you I am a bit of a sarcastic kind of sarcastic I'm trying to think of another word besides sarcastic person um jaded you know like I'm not real mushy necessarily why don't I take that back sometimes I can cry at everything but whatever my point is the idea of like oh my spouse is just my best friend basically makes me want to vomit so it's not my thing to think about ho he's just my best friend or she's just my best friend but I want you to think about for a second how would you describe a best friend somebody who you want to spend a lot of time with somebody who really knows you will somebody who's really trustworthy somebody that you can laugh with right so for all of my like hesitancy to say my best friend if it's a really good point that your spouse really should be your best friend one of the other aspects of the successful marriage is that you like each other as a person not necessarily something we always see in marriages right next is that you need to believe that marriage is a long-term sacred commitment like many of my students my parents were divorced they separated when I was three years old so I have lived almost all of my life with parents that weren't together and because of this I did not necessarily see marriage as a long-term sacred commitment and I have to admit I've been married now for almost 18 years it'll be 18 years this summer and at times when marriage gets tough and it does I have to admit - I've turn around the D word like we'll just get divorced and that's because I just saw when marriage got so tough and it seemed like it was never going to work I didn't believe that it was a long-term sacred commitment I'm fortunate that my husband grew up with parents that were married throughout his entire lifetime I'll talk about that in a second and he did believe that marriage was a long-term sacred commitment and really honestly it's because we got married young I was 23 he was 21 and his belief in marriage really carried us through to the point where I now believe that marriage is a long-term sacred commitment and so that's something to keep in mind if you are a person who is coming from a family that you don't have that modeling you might struggle with this you might not realize that you struggle with it until you're kind of in the thick of things here's something else for successful marriages do you think your spouse has grown more interesting um I just mentioned my husband's parents they were married for 33 years and actually one of the reasons that they broke up after 33 years of marriage is right here that you think your spouse has grown more interesting my father-in-law they grew up they didn't grow up they lived my husband grew up in very rural Oregon about an hour south east of Portland but in this very tiny little town with one yellow blinking light I totally make fun of him because I've grown up down here and one yellow blinking light is just crazy to me and so in that little teeny tiny town and they were kind of isolated and Shawn's dad my husband's dad um kind of just saw their lives they'd had my husband and his brother when they were very young 18 in 19 when they had my husband and so and he just kind of saw their lives of slowing down as the both boys moved off to college and got married and settled in different states and things my mother-in-law on the other hand they were young still they were and they're you know mid 40s by the time their kids were grown and so she wanted to travel she wanted to do things she wanted to go out with friends and so that disconnect between how they saw their life shaping up in their later years was ultimately one of the things that ended their marriage and so I always like to tell that anecdote to my students because I think it shows how important it is that you grow together and that you find things to do together that you both really are fulfilled by other aspects of successful marriages is that you agree on aims and goals you have to figure out a way to negotiate big stuff if you don't necessarily agree with it first off that you laugh together I honestly think that this is most important I always tell my students if I could have one wish for your future relationships it's that you could find someone that you could be absolutely utterly mortified over something happening over and you can just laugh till you cry with the person that you love and then finally you want the relationship to succeed and so that very much rings true of liking each other as a person and believing that marriage of the long term sacred commitment you have to want it and you have to want to be able to work towards the success of a marriage something else I want to discuss in relation to marriages and I'm really packing it in as I've said is something called the second shift and so the second shift if we go back to ideas of sociological research it's research that was done by a woman named Darlie Hoch sheild and some graduate assistants for I believe it was about 12 years from 1976 to 1988 they did ethnographic research so if you remember that is when you are in observing your subjects and so your submersed in what you're studying and so that's why they studied for so long for 12 years and so what I hope she'll did was study families she would literally hang out in families homes for years on end so that they were just used to the fact that are we stopped by every Tuesday and everybody knew early and arleigh watched the kids grow up and so what she was trying to study is to see what was going on in families at a time because remember in 1976 that's more than 40 years ago now women were working in the workforce and they in vast numbers that hadn't been working before and so she wanted to kind of see what the dynamic was with families with both parents working and so what she found was that women were working their job right outside of the home but then they were coming home and continuing to work and she called this work the second shift and so the second shift is the dual burden of paid and unpaid work experienced by working women women are not paid for all the work that they do at home now granted I think it's really important to mention that while we are talking about women working and doing the work at home but that's not necessarily always as accurate today they do research and do find that women are definitely in heteronormative relationships because that's also something important to mention that this is relationships between men and women which is a dated idea at this point there we have much more diversity in relationships with marriage equality and things of that sort and so they have found that women are still doing more nowadays but that men are contributing more and more but I want to focus in on the second shift as the research was done from 1976 to 1988 because it really was a seminal work in family sociology which is what we're discussing while discussing relationships and things of the sort so this work that is done at home is not paid and so what I actually have my students do when they're in class because we do a lot of interactive work they get into groups and I have them brainstorm all the tasks that a family needs to have done so all the cooking all the cleaning and I'm not just cleaning like dusting mopping vacuuming cleaning the bathroom scrubbing the toilet all the childcare stuff so I'm changing diapers and homework help and driving kids to soccer practice and all of that all of the other kind of house stuff like paying bills and going grocery shopping all of that effort and work that's happening I try to have students like hypothesize and figure out if you had to pay someone to do all of that work each month how much would it cost so you have to pay someone at least minimum wage and then and some you know when you think about it some things that parents do actually are jobs that get paid more than minimum wage like when you're paying bills for your family you're acting like that family's accountant an accountant makes more than minimum wage when you're cooking you know two or three meals a day for your family how much is a personal chef get paid and so trying to conceptualize how much work is being done by how much is worth because that's what I want to go back to that first line the dual burden of paid and unpaid work because all of this housework child is unpaid we kind of think it's not even in existence when that is not true and that is why so many people are so very overwhelmed and tired so women are working 15 hours longer than men each week that was hoax yield finding in in her first original study she has estimated it's about seven hours longer nowadays but what's really important when you seek 15 hours longer than men each week that doesn't look too bad right but actually when you do the math over a year that adds up to one month and 24 hour days so I want you to think about what day of the month it is right now and what time you are listening to this lecture and then think a month in advance right so if you were to start that very minute that you're thinking of you know a month in the future and work straight through no sleep no nothing I think you would really get a sense of not that you possibly could do it it makes it almost seem like well that's an even impossible to do and so the point really in me introducing the second shift to you is that there is number one there's inequality and so there's an equality in our world with gender and there's definitely a workplace wage gap that exists but because of the second shift there's also a leisure gap at home when you are putting in 15 hours more a week than your partner that's 15 hours less for you to possibly sleep to sit down and watch a favorite TV show to go get coffee with a friend and so that's a really important distinction and so the last thing I want to show you about the second shift is really how much it is worth and so salary comm is a website that does research each year to see how much work is being done and what it's worth and so for 2016 a stay-at-home mom is worth a hundred and forty three thousand dollars you can see that there is at forty hours a week that they're working and an additional overtime of 52 hours and then I know depends on how big you're looking at this particular slide but you can see all of the jobs that they've listed out and so what they've done is they have researched and surveyed women to see how long they are doing each one of these tasks and then they go to the average salaries for each one of these careers and average out how much all of this is worth just a second shift alone the work that is done after a person comes home from work is worth 90,000 dollars the last thing I want to tell you about the second shift is one of the findings early hope shield saw in her research is that there would be some women that were doing you know they'd have the same number of kids maybe they have a spouse contributing a similar amount of help around the house and they just reporting that they were tired overwhelmed that they were not satisfied in their life and they were just kind of miserable right but then hope shield would find women who had the same number of kids espoused contributing the same stuff the same kind of workload and they would tell her how happy they were that they were completely fulfilled that they loved their life that they had energy and so these women were living parallel lives and reporting completely different perceptions of them and so hope shield tried to figure out what was going on why would these women be perceiving their lives completely differently and she figured out that it was one aspect of their lives that made a huge difference in how they perceived all of the effort that they put forth for their family so would you think about what one thing can make a difference it's actually two little words that you could say that you hopefully hear is that we need to say all the time you thinking of what they're thank you women who heard their families saying thank you and had families that clearly communicated how much their effort was worth were overall more satisfied with their lives and the women that just felt like everything you know was never acknowledged it was always ignored it was just a given it was assumed were overwhelmed by it and that may a heck of a lot of sense and so if you are the person doing all the second shift care for yourself thank yourself if you have someone doing it for you make sure you thank them because as you can see from the slide it is worth a heck of a lot okay so we've met people we have fallen in love we have possibly lived together we've gotten married we've had a marriage that successful we discussed all the work that's done in families and so sometimes people get divorced right and that's actually going to be our last slide I want to touch on one theorist who has done research on divorces and has conceptualized it in an interesting manner and so a factual a psychologist named John Gottman has a marriage Institute and has studied marriage and he's made a name for himself he's fairly famous in like family psychology because he can watch a couple argue I believe it is for like five minutes and predict with 91% accuracy if they'll get divorced or not and so he calls these four things that he's looking for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and so I don't have images for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because I think they're big and scary but I will now present you with the four giraffes of the Apocalypse and so these are the four things that Gottman is looking for that he finds to be exceptionally detrimental and ultimately will doom a marriage he believes and so the first one is criticism criticism is different than complaining complaining would look like if I were to come home in an afternoon and the sink was full of dishes and my husband was sitting on the couch you know watching TV or something if I came in I'm like oh man why are the dishes all piled up I'm so tired I don't want to do the dishes criticism would be me jumping all over them what are you doing can't you see that they're sink the sink full of dishes like were you just waiting for me to get home can you see how that's different can you also hear how criticism seems to roll off my tongue pretty easily not good and so criticism puts a person immediately on and like to defend themselves and we're going to talk about defending them yourself in a second the second floor Horseman is contempt and so contempt is when you just cannot and the person like they breathe wrong and so you just kind of like utter hatred it's a pretty severe right the next one is defensive nasai and so that's when you as opposed to having a conversation and not necessarily if you're being criticized you might have a legitimate reason to be defensive but let's say that all the times that maybe your partner's trying to speak to you in a loving manner about something tough and you kind of go well no it's not this if you and you know you defend yourself instantaneously a relationship is not going to get very far when someone is constantly on the defensive and that is why Gottman considers it one of the four horsemen and then finally stonewalling stonewalling is when you just shut the person out you are not going to talk to them we're not discussing this you you block them out you build a stone wall Godman says out of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse one of them is the most detrimental for marriage and so I always have my students guess they usually guess stone walling but that is actually not true the most detrimental aspect of a relationship is I mean contempt come on if you have utter hatred that's not going to go well um one of the things I also want to share with you about divorce is how divorce is measured in our country because we always hear about the divorce rate right what's the divorce rate you know what it is fifty percent half of all marriages end in divorce we always hear this have you ever thought about how they go about getting that 50 percent when you think about it they don't have a database of marriages that start and end it's not like if I worry I got married in 1999 if my husband and I were ever to get divorced it's not like they'd go back and be like Oh Noren Shawn you know ex that didn't work out what they do is they look at how many people get married in a given year so let's say 2 million people got married and then they look at how many people got divorced let's say 1 million people got divorced well then they'll be like oh the divorce rate is 50% well you know darn well most of the people although maybe a few of the people that got divorced in the particular year that they're looking at did not get married in that same year they might have been married for five years 7 years 10 15 20 33 something like that and so the divorce rate isn't quite as dire as we think it is with the half of all marriages end in divorce I'm not going to tell you that it's only you know 12% or even 30% it's still probably in the 40% 40-ish you know 43 44 45 % range so that's pretty darn close to 50 but it's always a good idea to learn about where numbers are coming from and so I wanted to point that out to you ultimately relationships are a key aspect of our life and it's I think one of the really valuable moments in a sociology class that we get to look at that look at what we're learning in a way that impacts us so personally and so even though I have rushed through an entire relationship all the way to the very end I'm hoping that you can see a lot of your current life or what you want in your future life and that you're able to use this learning in your future relationship