Committing to a Relationship

This chapter draws on role theory and the changing cultural norms around relationships to explain how a risk of social poverty accompanies parents’ attempts to build lasting partnerships. These couples want to create and maintain healthy, lasting unions and parent their children together. Often their relationships are young, and so they are figuring out how to successfully occupy these roles. Role theory helps explain the challenges of the multiple role transitions—to adulthood, partnership, and parenthood—these young people are undertaking. This is particularly challenging given today’s relaxed social norms for romantic relationships, called “deinstitutionalization.” Despite these relaxed norms, which can make expectations and roles unclear, the partners often share relationship ideals. However, they often face an array of obstacles—such as finances and their concerns about their partners’ and their own abilities to be good spouses—to achieving these ideals; this increases the likelihood of social poverty in their lives.