Financial dynamics in long-term marriages: Surprising findings unearthed from decades’ worth of data

Marriage is often seen as a partnership, but how do couples share financial responsibilities over the long haul? A groundbreaking study in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility reveals that gender-egalitarian earnings patterns are more common than previously thought when viewed from a long-term perspective. These patterns, however, are deeply shaped by the socio-economic circumstances couples bring into their marriages.

The study addresses a gap in understanding how financial equality manifests within marriages over time. Previous research has largely focused on cross-sectional measures of economic homogamy—how similar spouses’ earnings are at a single point in time. However, this approach fails to capture the dynamic and evolving nature of spousal earnings trajectories.

Economic contributions within a marriage are not static; they fluctuate in response to life events, employment opportunities, and external circumstances. By adopting a long-term perspective, the new study sheds light on the various ways financial patterns develop within marriages and how these patterns relate to broader social inequalities.

“I study how couples share work and family responsibilities over the course of long-term relationships and how gender plays a role in these decisions,” said study author Allison Dunatchik, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina. “We know that in recent decades, people are increasingly likely to marry someone with a similar level of education and income as themselves. But what happens after marriage? I wanted to understand how common gender egalitarian earnings patterns are in the long-term within different-gender couples and what those patterns typically look like.”

Dunatchik conducted her study by analyzing data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, a dataset tracking a nationally representative cohort of individuals born between 1957 and 1964. The survey provided detailed information on marriage, education, employment, and earnings over multiple decades, allowing Dunatchik to examine how spouses’ financial contributions evolved over the course of their marriages. Her analysis focused on 5,354 heterosexual couples in their first marriages, following them for up to 30 years.

“Somewhat to my surprise, I found that gender egalitarian earnings patterns were relatively common among couples when we take a long-term perspective—and are more common than when we take a short-term approach,” Dunatchik told PsyPost. “Overall, I found that about 60% of couples follow gender-egalitarian long-term earnings patterns—but these patterns manifest in three different ways, which are highly stratified by couples’ socio-economic status.”

About half of the couples in the study followed a “dual earner” pattern, meaning both spouses maintained steady and consistent earnings throughout the course of their marriage. This pattern was particularly common among couples with higher socio-economic advantages at the time of marriage, such as greater education levels and higher initial earnings.

Another 6% of couples exhibited “jointly mobile” patterns. In these relationships, both spouses experienced earnings that rose, fell, or fluctuated in similar ways over time. Unlike the stability seen in dual-earner couples, these patterns often reflected shared financial instability, where both partners’ incomes responded to external factors such as job market fluctuations or life events.

Additionally, 5% of couples followed an “alternating earner” pattern, where primary earnership shifted between spouses over time. In these relationships, one partner would step into the primary earning role as the other’s income decreased.

The last two gender egalitarian patterns “have been largely overlooked in previous research on couple-level earnings patterns and are most common among couples with lower levels of education and earnings,” Dunatchik explained.

Traditional gendered earning configurations were also evident, with 34% of couples following a “male breadwinner” pattern but only 5% a “female breadwinner” pattern. The male breadwinner arrangement was most common among couples with lower socio-economic status, while female breadwinner configurations typically arose when wives entered the marriage with higher earnings and education levels than their husbands.

Interestingly, Dunatchik found that over half of the wives in her sample—55%—followed a “stable earner” trajectory. These women consistently earned relatively high incomes over time, spending the vast majority of marital years employed and contributing significantly to their household finances. This pattern counters the expectation that wives’ earnings typically decline after marriage or parenthood. Instead, it suggests that many women sustain their career engagement and financial contributions.

On the other hand, the study revealed unexpected instability among husbands’ earnings. While 77% of husbands followed stable earning patterns, a significant minority—23%—exhibited unstable trajectories. These men were categorized into groups with declining earnings, late entry into earning, or highly variable income patterns over the course of their marriages.

“I was quite surprised at the proportion of wives with relatively high, stable earnings and the proportion of husbands with unstable earnings,” Dunatchik said. “Previous research has typically focused on explaining why women’s earnings decline following marriage or first birth, but for over half of women in this study, earnings really didn’t decline substantially over the life course.

“Similarly, we often assume that husbands maintain stable earnings when in reality about a quarter of husbands in my study had unstable earnings. These findings emphasize the need to question these implicit assumptions about men’s and women’s economic roles within marriage.”

Dunatchik’s analysis also highlighted how socio-economic factors at the start of a marriage influence long-term earning patterns. Couples with greater economic stability at marriage were more likely to follow the dual-earner model, benefiting from consistent and stable incomes. By contrast, less advantaged couples were more likely to experience financial precarity, even when their earnings patterns appeared egalitarian in the short term.

This socio-economic stratification suggests that financial equality within marriages looks very different across income levels, with lower-income couples more likely to experience instability and higher-income couples consolidating economic advantages over time.

“Ultimately,” Dunatchik told PsyPost, “I think there are a few key takeaways from these findings: 1) Gender egalitarian earnings patterns are more common than often assumed when we take a long-term perspective. 2) Gender egalitarian earnings patterns can take a variety of forms within couples, some of which are overlooked when we consider only the short term. And 3) given the rise of earnings instability in recent decades, greater attention needs to be paid to the extent to which earnings instability is concentrated within households.”

Dunatchik acknowledges some limitations of her study, including its focus on a single cohort of Baby Boomers. “While this provides incredibly rich, longitudinal data, it does mean that the findings may not necessarily reflect the experiences of younger cohorts,” she noted. In particular, changes in labor market dynamics, gender norms, and family structures could produce different earnings trajectories for Millennials and Generation Z.

“I hope to examine how these patterns have changed over time and how they vary across countries to try to understand how policy and economic contexts shape couples’ long-term earnings patterns,” Dunatchik said.

The study, “His and hers earnings trajectories: Economic homogamy and long-term earnings inequality within and between different-sex couples,” was published November 22, 2024.