You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The recent emergence of relational structures that depart from conventional male-female relationships ipso facto raises the question of the extent to which there is a concomitant change in the domestic division of labor among such couples. Of equal significance is the pattern of decision making found therein. The degree to which such changes might be occurring is the subject of the paper. This report is basically an empirical one.
Couples in a conventional marital arrangement may be assumed to have entered into that arrangement by progressing through the traditional interactional pattern of dating, going steady, engagement, and then marriage, after which would follow the establishment of a division of labor that is clearly sex-linked. The focus here is only on selected parts of the division of labor as it exists among these types of couples, compared with those patterns as they exist among couples who have entered into a close and continuous intimate relationship by a process that departs from the traditional model of male-female intimacy. The research question examined here may be stated as follows: “Does the domestic division of labor and the pattern of decision making among unconventional male-female arrangements correspondingly exhibit patterns that equally depart from those found among conventional marital arrangements? Do patterns of decision making equally differ?”
To explore these questions, data were collected on couples who entered into their relationship following one of three paths: (1) conventional couples (N = 11), or those who entered into their marital arrangement via the traditional process of dating, engagement, and marriage; (2) quasi-conventional couples (N = 15), who were married but had lived together for a period of