How America has made it harder for Black people to marry.
Romantic relationships are in a weird place right now.
Sure, I have anecdotal evidence; I could open my phone and see a dating app horror story in any one of my group chats.
But I don’t have to take you through the dating woes of DC 30-somethings because data supports this too. Statistically, things are shifting. According to Pew Research, back in 1980 about 6 percent of Americans aged 40 and over had never been married. Now that number sits around 25 percent. If you’ve looked at the op-ed pages of any major newspaper, you’ve probably seen the hand-wringing about this falling marriage rate.
If you are or know a single person, this probably doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. But as I was looking at the numbers, one thing did surprise me: just how much lower the rate is for Black people. It’s always been lower, but the gap is now huge.
Back in the ’70s, a little over 20 percent of Black women had never been married. Now it’s nearly 48 percent.
Why do Black people get married less, and why does it matter?
Forbidden love
To answer that question for today’s episode of The Weeds — the latest in our “Black Women And …” series that looks at how policies are impacting Black women in particular — I spoke with Dianne Stewart, the author of Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage.
She argues that policy has made partnering especially difficult for Black people. Her answer centers around this idea that, for a long time, Black love in this country was forbidden — and that it still is.
It’s a statement that may feel provocative on its face, but Stewart argues that marriage is a civil right Black people were initially denied in America, and policy hasn’t done enough to catch up.
Though enslaved people often had informal marriages (there’s a reason it’s called jumping the broom), their unions weren’t legally recognized. Slave owners often separated families through sales, and would choose partners for enslaved people at will. This changed in 1865 with the end of slavery and the passage of the 13th Amendment, but after Emancipation, many families struggled to reunite. As late as the early 20th century, formerly enslaved people were putting out notices to find family members they had been separated from.
Barriers to partnership continued into the early 20th century. Until 1968, welfare operated with “man in the house” policies: If a woman was partnered with — or even dating — an able-bodied man, a family could no longer receive benefits. The thought process was that if a man was living in the house, then he should be able to fully provide for his family.
This disincentivized cohabitation and marriage for lower-income couples — a reality that disproportionately impacted Black families because many didn’t have wealth to begin with. The practice ended in 1968 with King v. Smith, when the Supreme Court ruled that the practice was unconstitutional.
How this plays out today
While many of these archaic policies no longer exist, their impacts are still felt today, and new policies have contributed as well.
The racism entrenched by slavery, for instance, plays a role. Take colorism, the phenomenon of discriminating against darker-skinned people that has its roots in colonialism and slavery. Historically, lighter-skinned people have been privileged because they’re closer to whiteness. That continues today, within larger institutions, and also within Black communities. In 2009, a study found that for women under 30, lighter-skinned Black women were married at twice the rate of their darker-skinned counterparts and 17 percent more than Black women with medium complexions.
For those seeking out relationships with Black men, there are also just fewer of those men in the dating pool. In 2021, Black men were incarcerated at over five times the rate of their white counterparts. Across race, women are earning college degrees at a higher rate than men, making it difficult for women who partner with men to find partners with the same educational background and economic status. Black women make up 66 percent of all African American bachelor’s degree holders, and those with degrees are more likely to marry someone with less education. College doesn’t equate to more wealth. The median net worth for college-educated Black households is $8,200; it’s $138,000 for white households with the same education.
This problem is exacerbated for Black people when you take into account what Stewart calls “wealth spread”: Black people who accumulate wealth are more likely to spend that money helping family members with less income. I call it the Teri Joseph effect. This makes a difference now that many consider marriage a capstone of adulthood rather than a cornerstone of it; Marriage is no longer that act that launches you into adulthood, but something you do when you feel emotionally and financially ready.
The statistics might not seem great if marriage is something you desire. But if you’re looking for love, all is not lost! Sure, the marriage rate is down, but that also means it was up at one point: Numbers are ever-evolving.
There are policies and solutions that could help change all this. For more on that — and a defense of the institution of marriage — check out my full conversation with Stewart.
This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.
Don’t think of love as a language. Experts say to think of love as a balanced diet instead.
As Meyers-Briggs quizzes are to corporate bonding retreats, love languages are to Hinge profiles. They show up again and again on dating sites, and on relationship advice forums and social media memes and debunking podcasts. There is something about the idea of love languages that seems to make people feel very passionately: My love language is words of affirmation. My love language is clean sheets. My boyfriend says he doesn’t have a love language, and I don’t know how to express my love to him. Love languages are bull crap. My love language is hating on love languages.
These agents of provocation emerged from the mind of Baptist pastor Gary Chapman, author of the 1992 book The 5 Love Languages. Chapman developed his theory of love languages while he was offering pastoral care to couples who came to his church looking for support in their marriages. As Chapman sees it, the reason married people fight is that they are each trying to express their love in ways the other person doesn’t understand. It is as if, he explains, they are speaking different languages.
Chapman’s initial modest offering has developed into a full-fledged media universe: The 5 Love Languages of Children, The 5 Love Languages Singles Edition, The 5 Love Languages for Men, The 5 Love Languages of Teenagers, The 5 Love Languages Military Edition. There is an app. There are Chapman-hosted podcasts.
The basic premise of the Chapman universe, however, has a pleasing Hogwarts house-style simplicity. Chapman cataloged five love languages, which he says are all the same for everybody: quality time, physical touch, receiving gifts, acts of service, and words of affirmation. You get one love language as your primary and another as your secondary, like being on the cusp in astrology. You aren’t allowed to have more than that. Ideally, you and your partner should have at least one in common. To pick your language, you take the personality quiz at the back of the book, now available online.
For true believers, the love languages are the key to relationship communication. Say one person feels loved when they’re cuddling (physical touch), while their partner considers cleaning the house (acts of service) to be the ultimate expression of their affection. Both of them might feel as though they’re putting in all the work for the relationship and as though the other person is neglecting them. Chapman’s love language concept gives both parties a way of talking about what they’re missing from one another without accusations.
Critics, however, point to Chapman’s rigid and conservative gender politics (most prominent in the earliest editions of the book) and the lack of scientific basis for his theories. Love languages, they warn, can be too inflexible to be practical.
“If someone identifies their primary love language as ‘gifts,’ they might unconsciously downplay the significance of spending quality time, being physically affectionate, engaging in deep conversations, and so on,” says Gideon Park, a co-author of a recent psychology paper examining the academic research on love languages. “This could create a narrow understanding of what constitutes love, hindering the richness and diversity of emotional connections.”
In the name of richness and diversity, let’s take a close look at the concept of love languages. Here’s what they get right, and what they get very wrong.
The scientific research into love languages is mixed at best
The paper Park worked on under lead author Emily Impett lays out three foundational tenets of The 5 Love Languages, which the researchers then checked against existing relationship science research. The three tenets are the basis of Chapman’s argument: There are exactly five love languages, everyone has exactly one primary love language, and when you match languages with your partner, you’re happier. According to the literature review from Impett et al., there does not seem to be empirical evidence for any of these three principles.
The paper finds few consistent results between studies about how people experience love. Still, when researchers ask people about what makes them feel loved, the reasons they list don’t necessarily have to do with ideas like “words of affirmation” or “acts of service.” One study in 2013 found that their subjects listed acts that sorted themselves into categories of sacrificial, intimate, quality time, supportive, and comforting love. Another study in 2010 found that subjects thought it was important when their partners made an effort to get to know their friends and talked about the best ways to deal with fights.
Impett et al. argue that it’s a losing battle to try to fit the way people love into preexisting categories. “A more comprehensive understanding of how people communicate love,” they write, “would require a bottom-up approach.” A good researcher would let people tell them what they thought love languages looked like, rather than imposing their own categories on their subjects.
When researchers do work with Chapman’s five categories, they tend to find that people aren’t willing to confine themselves to one primary love language. When people are asked to rate the importance of each love language on a scale of 1 to 5, they tend to give all 4s and 5s. If you try to force their hand by designing a test that makes them choose one, the same person will end up with a different answer depending on how you administer the test.
Finally, researchers consistently find that there’s no correlation between matching love languages with your partner and reporting higher relationship satisfaction. It simply doesn’t seem to matter whether you and your partner are native speakers of the same love language.
What does seem to matter is whether you and your partners are willing to learn each other’s languages. Two different studies have found that when you perceive your partner as speaking your love language well, your relationship satisfaction goes up. Although Impett et al. critique the methodology of those studies, they seem to point to a pretty basic conclusion: If you and your partner have thought about how to express affection for one another, and you do it on a regular basis, you’re likely to be pretty happy. Used well, Chapman’s love languages can be an effective tool for getting there.
Chapman’s gender and sexual politics are pretty worrisome
Chapman has never claimed that the love languages are based on any kind of scientifically rigorous process. They have always been an impressionistic tool that comes from the observations he made during his time as a pastor, counseling couples at his Baptist church in North Carolina in the ’80s and ’90s. That’s a specific political and cultural context, and it informs the way the theory of the love languages developed.
In the 1992 edition of The 5 Love Languages, Chapman is explicit about the demographics of the couples he worked with. They are white, heterosexual, conservative Christian couples. The book is structured under the assumption that the wife will stay at home and care for the house and children while the husband goes to work to provide for her. It is a thoroughly heterosexual, monogamous book that chooses not to acknowledge the existence of queer people, to say nothing of poly or trans people.
As the debunking podcast If Books Could Kill laid out in April 2023, most of the couple fights Chapman uses as examples tend to involve wives nagging their husbands to take care of chores. In one case, Chapman explains to a henpecked husband that while he thinks the best way to express love is through sex (physical touch), his wife only experiences love if he helps her with vacuuming (acts of service). If the husband would just help out with vacuuming once in a while, Chapman goes on, the wife will feel just as loved as the husband does when they have sex. The idea that the wife might be interested in sex but can’t focus on it while never-ending housework piles up all around her is not one Chapman engages with.
The most infamous of these examples comes with the case study of Ann, who goes to Chapman for guidance in dealing with her husband’s cruelty. “Is it possible to love someone you hate?” she asks Chapman. In response, he gives her Bible passages about loving one’s enemies and tells her that her husband’s love language is probably physical touch. In order to save the marriage, he advises her, she should stop all complaints about her husband and start initiating sex at least twice a week.
Ann tells Chapman that sex with her husband is difficult for her because she feels so estranged from her husband. When they’re intimate, she says, she feels “used rather than loved.” Lots of women feel this way, Chapman tells her. Her Christian faith will help her through it. Ann does as Chapman tells her to, and the marriage is saved.
In later editions, Chapman revised this case study. (He told the Washington Post that “physical abuse today is far more evident and apparent than it was when I wrote the book.”) In the new version, Chapman tells Ann to be more physically affectionate with her husband — ruffle his hair, kiss him on the cheek — and perhaps consider working her way up to initiating sex when their relationship has recovered some.
The new advice is less blatantly misogynistic than the advice of the first edition, but both contain the same underlying logic: If a woman’s husband is emotionally abusive toward her, it is her responsibility to coddle him and mollify him until he decides to treat her better. In real life, however, the only person who can control the behavior of an abuser is the abuser themselves.
Some of this ideology has made its way into the structure of the love language model. In their paper, Impett et al. note that some studies associate high relationship satisfaction with high respect for each other’s autonomy and personal goals outside of the relationship. Such egalitarian goals do not appear anywhere in Chapman’s models.
Instead of the love languages, consider aiming for a love diet
The love languages might be a flawed concept, but they speak deeply to thousands of people. Partly, that’s because people love a personality quiz, and the love languages come with one. But Chapman also had a key insight that he was able to express with the straightforward and intuitive metaphor of different languages: The way that you express and experience love might be different from the way your partner expresses and experiences love. That’s a valuable idea.
“If I had to pick one reason why I think many couples find Chapman’s book to be helpful,” says Park, “it is not because they learned their own or their partner’s love language but because it gets people to identify any currently unmet needs in their relationship and opens up lines of communication to address those needs.”
Still, the research suggests that adhering rigidly to the love language model won’t serve you well over time, in large part because it doesn’t match how human relationships work. We love in many ways, not just one.
“It is very likely that in one situation, someone might need a certain type of love or support,” says Park. “Perhaps after losing out on a promotion, you just need your partner to listen and provide you with words of affirmation. Maybe on an anniversary dinner, affection makes you feel special. Or during a particularly stressful time at work, having a partner take on extra household tasks is the best way to support you.”
In their paper, Impett et al. suggest replacing the metaphor of the love languages with a new one: the love diet.
“People should make sure they have a nutritionally balanced relationship,” they argue.
Under this metaphor, choosing one primary love language is something like a crash diet where you eat nothing but fruit, even though your body also needs carbs and fats and proteins to survive. For Impett et al., healthy relationships should prioritize quality time and physical touch, compliments and presents and helping each other out, plus all the other categories of love that don’t fit into Chapman’s model. “If they feel that something is missing,” the paper continues, “they could discuss that imbalance (unmet need) with their partner.”
Gary Chapman’s five love languages taught a lot of people how to start talking about their needs. It might be time for the conversation to evolve — perhaps over dinner.
In the age of electric vehicles, the hybrid is still a contender.
Are electric vehicles hitting a pothole?
Ford announced last month that it was cutting production of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck. General Motors and Volkswagen last year said they would reduce electric vehicle manufacturing. All-electric and plug-in hybrid carmakers are struggling too, with layoffs or slowing assembly lines at companies like BYD, Lucid, Polestar, and Fisker. Tesla, the world’s most valuable car company, lost $80 billion in value in January — 12 percent of its market capitalization — after CEO Elon Musk projected lower sales this year.
Meanwhile, EV users are running into some of the harsh realities of living on electrons. Car rental company Hertz last month said that it was selling off 20,000 electric cars — one-third of its electric fleet — and replacing them with gasoline-powered vehicles, blaming low demand and high operating costs. Hertz is having trouble finding buyers and expects to take a $245 million hit.
Drivers around the United States have also run into some unexpected problems. Some EV owners have experienced software glitches, and manufacturers have had to delay deliveries to squash bugs. Public EV charging stations continue to suffer from reliability problems, which recent extreme weather has made impossible to ignore: A sudden Arctic cold blast across the country in January left EV drivers waiting hours at charging stations as the frigid temperatures reduced battery capacities and caused chargers to malfunction.
However, the numbers show that electrification is nonetheless charging ahead. Americans bought almost 1.2 million EVs last year — below some forecasts, but still a record high. They now make up 7.6 percent of the US vehicle market.
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Umair Irfan/Vox
So Americans aren’t slamming the brakes on electric cars so much as letting up on the gas pedal, and the market could pick up some speed again this year. Ford noted that it’s still expecting growth in EV sales around the world in 2024 and is developing new electric models.
Manufacturers are waging a price war, so new electrics are getting cheaper. While they’re still pricier than their gasoline equivalents, there are lots of used EVs available — many still under warranty. Hertz is currently selling its used Tesla Model 3s for less than $23,000, and you could get one for thousands of dollars less if you qualify for EV tax credits and rebates.
Still, electric cars aren’t on pace for what is ostensibly their ultimate goal: mitigating climate change. Global greenhouse gas emissions reached a record high last year. In the US, transportation is their largest source, accounting for 29 percent of overall emissions. Light-duty vehicles — sedans, crossovers, SUVs, pickup trucks — make up 17 percent of total emissions. The US has committed to cutting its carbon pollution by about 38 percent below current levels by 2030. Nine states now have deadlines for banning sales of new fossil fuel-powered cars.
Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rules that would effectively require two-thirds of cars sold in the US to produce zero emissions. Electrifying cars is an important step, but many drivers have real and perceived concerns about giving up on gasoline entirely: price, performance, range anxiety, reliability, and charging infrastructure.
So it’s no surprise that hybrid cars — models that blend electric and gasoline power — are more popular than ever, even as some manufacturers have begun pulling them from their lineups. “The number of hybrid model offerings declined in 2023, but sales increased significantly across existing models,” according to the Energy Information Administration.
Americans are buying around as many hybrid cars as fully electric vehicles, and demand is growing.
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Energy Information Administration
The appeal of a hybrid is intuitive. But whether hybrids get us to our goals or become a time-wasting detour depends on how technology advances, how policies evolve, and how the market changes.
Electric vehicles did break some promises — and some hearts
EVs hold a lot of promise. A fully electric car operates at 77 percent efficiency, whereas only 12 to 30 percent of the energy from gasoline actually goes toward moving the car, with the rest mostly wasted as heat. Though it’s only as clean as the grid that powers it, an EV charged up by a coal power plant still emits less carbon dioxide on balance than an internal combustion engine. And its lifetime climate impact is smaller, even accounting for manufacturing.
In theory, EVs offer many practical advantages too. Electric drivetrains are usually simpler, with fewer moving parts that can wear out, increasing reliability and reducing maintenance. Driving ranges are increasing all the time, charging times are getting shorter, charging stations are blooming everywhere, and while they tend to be more expensive now, EVs could close the gap with fossil fuel-powered vehicles as they achieve economies of scale.
The real world tells a different story.
Hertz found that EVs in general and Teslas in particular had higher repair costs, about double those of their gasoline counterparts. The company also observed that its customers were more likely to damage Teslas, often because they were using them for ride-sharing services.
Though EVs tend to have robust warranties — often eight years or more — and fewer components, those parts can be very expensive to replace once out of warranty or when damaged in a collision. A battery pack can cost up to half the price of an electric car, but there aren’t that many mechanics that can fix them, and parts are hard to find.
That means batteries are often replaced rather than repaired, and insurers often end up totaling EVs that have sustained seemingly minor damage. That raises insurance rates for all EV owners. Meanwhile, some car dealers — which can make as much as half of their profits from repairs and maintenance — are reluctant to stock EVs on their lots.
Chilly weather has proven to be another challenge. While gasoline-powered cars can lose almost a quarter of their range in the winter, the cold can take a 41 percent bite out of an EV’s mileage. Even in warm weather, many EVs aren’t living up to their window stickers. Consumer Reports found that half of the 22 EVs they tested fell short of their range estimates.
Charging infrastructure isn’t where it needs to be either. In frigid conditions, chargers struggle to pump electrons. Many EV owners top up at home, but those who have tried to reenergize on the road have sometimes found chargers to be scarce, inoperable, or slow. Some EV owners have had their cars rendered unusable at public charging stations.
And while manufacturers have been cutting EV prices in recent months, they’re still costly. More than three-quarters of EVs sold last year were classified as luxury vehicles. Many of them were too expensive to qualify for tax breaks and incentives.
In December 2023, 77% of BEV sales were categorized as luxury, according to Wards Intelligence. While the precise definition of “luxury” is debatable, luxury vehicle prices clearly skew to the higher end of the market. pic.twitter.com/avJ0WYDPJD
— Joe DeCarolis (@EIA_One) February 6, 2024
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