This book documents the marital experiences of 32 couples like Christie and Mike—couples that are in what I call “different-origin” marriages. These are couples who share their current position in the middle class but who grew up in different classes. In each pair, one partner grew up in a blue-collar family while the other grew up in a professional white-collar family. The book shows that, though they rarely recognized it, the class of each partner’s past influenced why they initially found their partner appealing and what differences they would later navigate.
This quote is the book in a nutshell. Distilled down to its essential elements, this paragraph serves as an effective summary for the intention of the author. Over the course of the narrative, the reader will be introduced to a variety of married couples who are share all share only one aspect: one spouse was raised in a blue-collar environment and the other in a white-collar environment. The thesis, arguments, evidence and conclusions of the research thereupon conducted all relate to the specific findings which are explored in detail over the course of the narrative.
Likely because of their divergent economic conditions, those with blue-collar-origins were more likely to lack but desire a sense of stability, while those from white-collar-backgrounds were more likely to project a sense of stability to others.
A key operational component derived from the research is something the author identifies as “cultural complements.” This is basically just a fancy term for saying that “opposites attract” but it is the driving force behind what brings together couple who experienced widely disparate experiences in growing up. Blue-collar class is suggestive of a lot more than simply getting by on hourly wages rather than a salary while insisting that the economic foundation forms the basis of much if not necessarily all those differences which attract. The divergence between a lower annual income impact any number of interests that may serve to become the things which cause attraction between each other—including tastes in leisure and entertainment, political and social ideologies, hobbies and avocations, etc—but the driving force pointed to by the author’s research is that blue-collar experiences engender a sense of instability that the managerial mindset of those raised in white-collar environments can offset.
Those from white-collar and blue-collar backgrounds then remembered growing up with different feeling rules. White-collar-origin spouses felt their parents’ feeling rules called for managed emotional sensibilities, while blue-collar-origin spouses felt their parents’ feeling rules called for laissez-faire emotional sensibilities.
The divide between blue-collar and white-collar environments is not just about money. The shared life experiences of those belonging to each of the two distinct classes which the book limits its research to remains remarkably similar regardless of the exact details. For instance, the blue-collar “mindset” aligns remarkably close along the same spectrum whether that experience means growing up as the son of a police officer or the daughter of a farmer while the white-collar experience remains essentially unchanged whether both parents were college professors or the father a bank manager and the mother a stay-at-home mom. Regardless of the wide variety in the details, the overall class experience manages to instill an emotional barometer that is surprising homogenous. Almost without the research reveals a propensity toward impulsive emotional decision-making and less inhibition toward outward demonstrations of emotions among those spouses raised in blue-collar families while those spouses raised in white-collar families tend toward internalizing emotional responses and a higher degree of consideration of feelings before making any decision.
