Few studies have examined how financial relationship issues are associated with cohabiting individuals' risk of union dissolution or marriage. Competing-risks Cox regressions using the cohabiting data in the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 483) found that financial disagreements predicted union dissolution, whereas disagreements…

Motivated by the trend of women spending more time in paid labor and the general speedup of everyday life, the authors explore whether the resulting time crunch affects sexual frequency among married couples. Although prior research has examined the associations between relationship quality and household labor time, few have examined a dimension…

I argue that both the dominant models of the relationship between earnings and housework, economic dependence and gender display, have fundamental defects. They focus on the effect of women's earnings compared to their husbands' on their housework and ignore the possibility of an independent relationship between women's own earnings and their time…

We examine affective closeness, contact, and helping among adult siblings using data for over 1,500 respondents in 2-child families from the National Survey of Families and Households. Using this subsample allows us to investigate differences by gender of respondent and of individual siblings using a nationally representative sample. We find that…

Cohabiting couples and couples who cohabit prior to marriage have less stable relationships than married couples who did not cohabit, and these differences in stability may be linked to different processes within the relationships. This research examines the similarity of partners' beliefs about the division of household labor using the National…

Examines how much fathers participate in child care and factors related to it. Findings indicate that hours on the job keep some men from active fathering, but if they begin taking care of young children, a continuing pattern is established. Mothers' child-care hours are positively related to fathers' child care, and fathers do more with sons.…