As American wives increasingly outearn their husbands, many couples experience what relationship coach Suzanne Venker calls “role-reversal stress.” This stress can be deleterious for their emotional and sexual lives, three studies published in the American Sociological Review suggest:
• Harvard sociologist Alexandra Killewald found that if a husband is employed full-time, the couple has a 2.5% chance of splitting up in the next year; if he isn’t, the likelihood of divorce rises to 3.3%.
• Christin Munsch of the University of Connecticut found that husbands who are economically dependent on their wives have a greater propensity to be unfaithful.
• Three sociologists from the Juan March Institute and the University of Washington found that the frequency of marital sex is lower for couples in which the husband often does traditionally feminine chores such as cooking, cleaning and taking care of kids, and higher if he does masculine ones like yard work, paying bills and car maintenance. Julie Brines told reporters that she and her co-authors were surprised at “how robust the connection was between a traditional division of housework and sexual frequency.”
It seems younger generations are taking note. A University of Texas survey in 2014 found that younger millennial men, then 18 to 25, were likelier to agree with the statement “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family” than Generation X men or older millennials had been at the same age.
These evolving attitudes may reflect differences in the households in which these young people grew up. In 1987 wives outearned men in less than 25% of households. By 2015 that share was 38%.