12.3.2: Marriage

 12.3.2: Marriage 

Ask Americans why they married, and they will say that they were “in love.” Contrary to folklore, whatever love is, it certainly is not blind. That is, love does not hit us willy-nilly, as if Cupid had shot darts blindly into a crowd. If it did, marital patterns would be unpredictable. When we look at who marries whom, however, we can see that love follows social channels. The Social Channels of Love and Marriage The most highly predictable social channels are age, education, social class, and race–ethnicity. For example, a Latina with a college degree whose parents are both physicians is likely to fall in love with and marry a Latino slightly older than herself who has graduated from college. Similarly, a girl who drops out of high school and whose parents are on welfare is likely to fall in love with and marry a man who comes from a background similar to hers. Sociologists use the term homogamy to refer to the tendency of people who have similar characteristics to marry one another. Homogamy occurs largely as a result of propinquity, or spatial nearness. This is a sociological way of saying that we tend to “fall in love” with and marry someone who lives near us or someone we meet at school, church, work, or a neighborhood bar. The people with whom we associate are far from a random sample of the population, since social filters produce neighborhoods, schools, and places of worship that follow racial–ethnic and social class lines. As with all social patterns, there are exceptions. Although most Americans marry someone of their same racial–ethnic background, 10 percent do not. Ten percent is a lot of people. With 63 million married couples in the United States, this comes close to about 6 million couples (Statistical Abstract 2019: Table 60). 

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are an example of the most common pattern of marriages between African Americans and whites. Credit: Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty Images 392 One of the more dramatic changes in U.S. marriage is the increase in marriages between African Americans and whites. Today it is difficult to realize how norm-shattering such marriages used to be, but they were once illegal in forty states (Staples 2008). In Mississippi, the penalty for interracial marriage was life in prison (Crossen 2004b). Despite the risks, a few couples crossed the “color line,” but it took the social upheaval of the 1960s to shatter this barrier. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state laws that prohibited such marriages. Figure 12.1 shows this change. Look at the race–ethnicity of the husbands and wives in these marriages, and you will see that here, too, Cupid’s arrows don’t hit random targets. Why do you think this particular pattern exists? Why do you think it is changing? Figure 12.1 Marriages between Whites and African Americans: The Race–Ethnicity of the Husbands and Wives