Seeking Alignment: Work and Inequality in Young U.S. Elites’ Romantic Relationships

• In Event: Anti-Capitalist Feminisms (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Sex and Gender Section)

Abstract

A wealth of social scientific research on romantic relationships has shown intra-relationship inequalities along class and gender lines. What about disparities between the couple and their society? This article suggests studying how romantic relationships can function as both dividend and constitutive process of privilege amid widespread precarity. I examine the subject of young (24-40 years of age) U.S. elites, their romantic relationships, and work. Drawing on fifty semi-structured interviews with men, women, and nonbinary individuals about their serious romantic relationships, I demonstrate how young people in elite professions and institutions derive norms from these spaces; have their relationships alternately subsidized and threatened by a hybrid work-love infrastructure; and develop ideals for relationships that are informed by imperatives of white-collar work, with broad implications for a landscape of already deeply unequal access to intimate relationships.

Author

• Adora Lily Svitak, Yale University