Social scientists can be real buzzkills. That thing you enjoy? Yeah, you’ve been conditioned since birth to find it appealing. That experience you found so meaningful, so personal? Tons of people have felt the same.
This wet-blanketing is especially depressing when applied to the realm of the heart, where social scientific logic runs very much counter to what most of us would prefer to focus on: love, romance, intimacy, etc.
But like it or not, the rhetoric of romance often runs up against the reality of conflict and inequality. Marriage boosters like to talk a big game about “two becoming one,” but this is more aspirational than actual. It is impossible for two humans to have perfectly overlapping interests and preferences. Any relationship requires compromise and “taking one for the team” and generally doing stuff you’d rather not do.
Put another way, part of managing a relationship is managing power: we fight for what we want and give ground where we can. When power is balanced, both partners give and get in roughly equal measures. When it’s not, one partner’s interests routinely dominate the other’s.
A few years ago, my then-acquaintance, now friend and close collaborator, Jaclyn Wong, approached me with a pitch to join forces and write a paper about marital power. Family sociologists paid a fair bit of attention to the topic in the 80s and 90s, but interest trickled off in the ensuing decades. Jaclyn argued—compellingly—that it was important to understand how power worked among contemporary different-gender couples, particularly those who subscribe to the notion of marriage as a merger of equals. The fruits of our labor have just been published in Gender & Society, but I thought I’d offer a less academic-y take on what we learned here.
One of the first steps in any new research project is to review what’s already been said. Our reading quickly led us to the work of Aafke Komter, a Dutch sociologist who published a landmark paper on marital power (also in Gender & Society!) in 1989. Komter defined power as the ability of one spouse to “consciously or unconsciously” influence the feelings, beliefs, thoughts, and actions of the other.
More important for our purposes, Komter called out three main subtypes of marital power. In the first and most clear-cut case (“manifest power”), power means overruling your partner to assert your own interests. They want to vacation in Fiji, but you’d prefer Rome; you argue about it but end up in Rome. They ask you to start cleaning up your dishes in a timely fashion (no, “within 24 hours” is not timely); you refuse.
Slightly less obvious is “latent power.” This kind doesn’t involve overt conflict or confrontation. Instead, the less powerful partner anticipates the other’s preferences and avoids requesting something that would run counter to them. They secretly dream of Fiji but know you hate beaches, so they go along with your Rome plan while nursing a tiny grudge. They really wish you would put your dishes in the godd*m dishwasher but predict that asking you would cause a fight while changing very little, so they keep quiet.
The third, and most insidious, kind of power is “invisible.” When invisible power is operating, both spouses take their power-imbalanced situation for granted: it’s natural, just the way things are. Perhaps they don’t even bother to interrogate their vacation preferences – you work so hard, it’s only right that you’d get to dictate where you travel. Maybe the thought that you should clean up after yourself doesn’t cross their mind; they take for granted that maintaining order is their thing, not yours.
Anyone who’s ever been in a relationship can probably rattle off various personal examples of at least the first two types (that “invisible” stuff is harder to see, as the name implies). To be clear, that doesn’t mean your relationship is flawed: conflict and compromise are part of the package when you merge your life with someone else’s.
But, at least historically, women in different-gender partnerships have tended to get the short end of the power stick. Their needs and interests and preferences are more often overruled or ignored altogether. (See: large and persistent gender gaps in household labor, the frequent tendency for men’s career needs to be prioritized over women’s.)
What Jaclyn and I wanted to know was why and how that was still happening, even for couples who endorse gender equality and aspire to enact it in their own lives. Our hunch was that invisible power was doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, since both manifest and latent power run counter to the egalitarian vision many people have for their relationships.
In Komter’s day, invisible power was built around the consensus that men’s needs came first. (See: patriarchy.) That didn’t seem to fit many of the couples Jaclyn and I knew and interviewed, and yet their outcomes (she does more unpaid labor; his career priorities become the couple’s priorities) didn’t look all that different than their predecessors’. Why?
To find out, we took a gamble on a slightly unusual strategy: we combined our independent interview samples into one larger pool of 44 different-gender married or engaged couples (notably, all middle-class+ and primarily white; far from representative). I could write a whole separate post on the pros and cons of this move, and perhaps I will.
The main reason we did it, though, was because we wanted to be able to zoom in on both domestic and career decision-making patterns. I had interviewed couples in great depth about the minutiae of their daily lives; Jaclyn went deep with couples about how they handled big career moves (see her excellent 2023 book for more). Both of us had also gathered some data about the other domain (e.g., career in my case), but together we could cover much more ground.
Whew. Since I’ve barely made it through the set-up of the paper, and this is already getting long, I’m going to go ahead and make this a multi-parter. Stay tuned to learn about the power management strategies we discovered (“emphasizing us” and “balancing a decision portfolio”)! I will do my best not to make you wait a whole month…
Reading rec
The best thing I read in February was The Happy Runner by Megan and David Roche. I’ve been on a bit of a running kick lately and gone way down the rabbit hole on training theory, fueling strategies, and picking out my 2024 races. The Roches’ extreme positivity and enthusiasm (in the book, and also on their podcast) have been a powerful check on my tendency to obsess over performance and forget that running is a hobby that’s supposed to be fun. Part II of the book goes deep on running training, but Part I is a giant pep talk that applies to pretty much any athletic pursuit. If you’re allergic to optimism, best to avoid, but if you could use a pick-me-up, I highly recommend.