Read the Book(Uploaded) and write about the questions(each 1150~200 words)

Figure 10.3 illustrates this change. Look at the race–ethnicity of the husbands and wives in these marriages, and you will see that here, too, Cupid’s arrows don’t hit random targets. Why do you think this particular pattern exists?

Childbirth Ideal Family Size. The number of children that Americans consider ideal has changed over the years, with preferences moving to smaller families. Figure 10.4 shows this change, based on questions the Gallup organization has been asking since the 1930s. Religion shows an interesting divide, not be- tween Protestants and Roman Catholics, who give the same

You may have noticed that this research was really about sexual attraction, not love. The point, however, is that romantic love usually begins with sexual attraction. Finding ourselves sexually attracted to someone, we spend time with that person. If we discover mutual interests, we may label our feelings “love.” Apparently, then, romantic love has two components. The first is emotional, a feeling of sexual attraction. The second is cognitive, a label that we attach to our feelings. If we attach this label, we describe ourselves as being “in love.”

Marriage In the typical case, marriage in the United States is preceded by “love,” but, contrary to folklore, whatever love is, it certainly is not blind. That is, love does not hit us willy-nilly, as if Cupid had shot darts blindly into a crowd. If it did, marital patterns would be un- predictable. An examination of who marries whom, however, reveals that love is socially channeled.

The Social Channels of Love and Marriage. The most highly predictable social channels are age, education, social class, and race–ethnicity. For example, a Latina with a college degree whose parents are both physicians is likely to fall in love with and marry a Latino slightly older than herself who has graduated from college. Similarly, a girl who drops out of high school and whose parents are on welfare is likely to fall in love with and marry a man who comes from a background similar to hers.

Sociologists use the term homogamy to refer to the tendency of people who have sim- ilar characteristics to marry one another. Homogamy occurs largely as a result of propinquity, or spatial nearness. That is, we tend to “fall in love” with and marry people who live near us or whom we meet at school, church, or work. The people with whom we as- sociate are far from a random sample of the population, for social filters produce neighbor- hoods, schools, and places of worship that follow racial–ethnic and social class lines.

As with all social patterns, there are exceptions. Although 93 percent of Americans who marry choose someone of their same racial–ethnic background, 7 percent do not. Because there are 60 million married couples in the United States, those 7 percent add up, totaling over 4 million couples (Statistical Abstract 2011: Table 60).

One of the more dramatic changes in U.S. marriage patterns is the increase in marriages between African Americans and whites. Today it is difficult to realize how norm-shattering such marriages used to be, but they used to be illegal in 40 states (Sta- ples 2008). Mississippi had the most extreme penalty for interra- cial marriage: life in prison (Crossen 2004b). Despite the risks, a few couples crossed the “color line,” but it took the social up- heaval of the 1960s to break this barrier permanently. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state laws that prohib- ited such marriages.

310 C h a p t e r 1 0 M A R R I A G E A N D F A M I L Y

homogamy the tendency of people with similar characteristics to marry one another

300

350

To ta

l i n T

h o u sa

n d s

1970 19901980

24

45 61

196

41

122

150

354

20092000Year

25

50

75

100

125

150

175

200

225

250

275

0

325 White husband, African American wife

African American husband, white wife

95

268

350

375

FIGURE 10.3 Marriages Between Whites and African Americans: The Race–Ethnicity of the Husbands and Wives

Source: By the author. Based on Statistical Abstract of the United States 1990:Table 53; 2011:Table 60.