Considering marriage? Mind the Expectations Gap
Another wedding season, another study showing that marriage is a raw deal for heterosexual women.
Last month, University College London and the London School of Economics released a joint study that found men who married were far less likely to suffer from metabolic syndrome – a combination of diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity – than their unmarried counterparts. For married women, the same health benefits simply did not exist.
It’s just the latest in a towering wall of research illustrating that the much-touted benefits of marriage are, in fact, a gendered proposition. The phenomenon, known in sociological circles as the Marriage Benefits Imbalance, has shown consistently that while married men enjoy increases in health, wealth and happiness over their singleton brothers, married women tend to be less financially stable, more depressed, less physically fit and more vulnerable to violence and abuse than their single and unmarried female counterparts.
.. My best educated guess would involve yet another nifty sociological term: the Expectations Gap. This is the idea that the sort of women who tend to marry are often the sort of women who tend to have – shall we say – untenable expectations of the benefits their union is going to provide.