21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Marriage Is The New Middle-Class Luxury Item. “For their new paper ‘Intimate Inequalities: Love and Work in a Post-Industrial Landscape,’ University of Virginia sociologist Sarah Corse and Harvard sociologist Jennifer Silva interviewed 300 working- and middle-class Americans like Cindy, Megan, Earl, and Jan about their work and relationships. They found that as the American workforce and the American marriage have destabilized over the past half-century, marriage has become an increasingly inaccessible option for working-class Americans. While middle-class people like Earl and Jan are throwing money at their intimate relationships to keep them stable, working-class people like Cindy and Megan have been priced out of the institution.”

I’m not sure the problem is solely an economic one. From the comments: “Cindy’s and Megan’s issues don’t seem money-related to me. Rather, it’s a lack of common sense in choosing healthy relationships for Cindy and failing to get a basic high school education in Megan’s case. It also helps not to date jail birds.” In the bad old days when bourgeois values ruled, there would have been stronger social pressure to avoid those errors, as well as to avoid overspending and other dysfunctional behaviors. Now such values — or at least those who loudly espouse them — are practically transgressive.

UPDATE: From the comments:

They really do not understand the difference between correlation and causation, do they?

The same behavior patterns that allow a successful marriage lead, almost inevitably, to a middle class (or better) lifestyle.

Reynolds’ law follows as a corollary.

As usual. Reynolds’ Law has a lot of applications, if you look for them.