Social scientists have tried to identify the factors behind rising divorce rates and delayed marriage for decades, trends even more pronounced among African Americans than in the general population. However, far less attention has been paid to "what works." What is distinctive about how couples in lasting relationships? How do they conceptualize and conduct their relationships? How do they develop attitudes and practices that facilitate enduring unions? This dissertation addresses these questions by comparing working- and middle-class black married couples. In doing so, the project shifts the focus towards how interpersonal relations, support networks and resources influence durability. The project employs interviews with approximately 70 relationship experts and with couples, as well as observational data regarding the dynamics among couples as they tell their relationship stories.
Broader Impacts Family stability is a topic of interest to a broad set of stakeholders. The general public, marriage professionals (counselors), as well as policy makers have expressed sustained interest in fostering an environment conducive to stabilizing families. Findings from this study may inform public debate about these factors. In addition, by focusing on strategies used by African American couples, this study seeks to complement extant work and contribute to our understanding of what helps relationships endure more generally. Finally, insights from this research may enable us to formulate a range of "best practices" that can inform counseling and policy programs designed to foster an environment conducive to relationship longevity.
Illustrated through a case study of black couples in enduring unions (10-40 years), this project helps us understand the emotional demands of modern relationships and the emotion norms that shape how partners manange them - individually and together. More precisely, the study offers us insight into how couples dealt with emotional demands of increased vulnerability, which recent research in social work and psychology that has identified as a critical challenge in black couples’ ability to cultivate emotional intimacy and interdependence - evidenced in difficulty letting down their guards, getting emotionally attached, as well as constrained disclosure and fear of reliance in partners & spouses intimate relationships. It explores three primary issues: how partners interpret emotional demands and the strategies of emotion work they use to negotiate them; how broader culturally grounded emotional traditions can yield emotion norms[feeling rules] and strategies that undermine the potential for connection; and how new emotion norms and strategies can be cultivated in the transformative process of creating shared lives. In taking black couples as a case study in emotion management, the dissertation this project yields breaks new ground, offering a rare instance of a study focusinf explicitly on emotion work in black couples’ relationships. It helps us understand how socialization in different emotional traditions yield distinctive emotional lexicons of strategies to negotiate relationship tensions. Specifically, it demonstrates how the emotional socialization many receive to cope with economic insecurity, family instability and racism, results in a privileging of reconciled resilience - which can undermine the vulnerability needed for intimacy and interdependence. Thus, the study works to identify and interpret the strategies some black women and men create to counteract upbringing in emotional cultures that privilege resilience over intimacy. Looking at men and women's emotion work as a cultural project, the study offers some new perspectives on how we think about the role of culture in black gender patterns. Specifically, it moves us beyond the typical emphasis on cultural attitudes, values, expectations and stereotypes. Rather, it highlights the crucial, yet understudied, role of emotional traditions as a pathway through which culture shapes action. Unfortunately, to date, the cultural significance of emotions has been fairly absent in studies of "the black family". Fortunately, research on emotion work may be uniquely suited to help us understand the puzzle of undermined intimate connection among black couples. The study is particularly timely given sociologists increasing concern with how uncertainty impacts emotional practices, particularly as the recent economic downturn has left many Americans feeling like they live in a society that is increasingly uncertain and insecure. Beyond what the downturn means for our wallets, sociologists of culture and emotions are doing cutting-edge work that looks at the kind of cultural accommodations Americans are making in how they manage their emotions to navigate this altered landscape of a "new insecurity culture". This study complicates those claims of "newness" - suggesting that insecurity culture only seems "new" when we leave race out the equation. The black experience in America has long been marked by uncertainty – from economic insecurity to social marginalization. What is new is that (some of) these conditions and the anxieties they birth, are becoming prevalent in the broader American society. This study may help us understand how emotional traditions with lexicons of emotion norms and emotional strategies develop in uncertain times. As a result, the black case may be instructive on these patterns that are fast becoming characteristic in American culture at large. Finally, by shedding light on how people develop best-practices to guide their daily lives, producing knowledge on "what works," instead of simply failure and crisis – it may prove valuable in crafting and refining practical strategies to incorporate in relationship programming.
