Yodanis, Carrie & Sean Lauer. 2014. Is Marriage Individualized? What Couples Actually Do. Journal of Family Theory & Review 6: 184-197.
There is a growing acceptance that marriage today is individualized. This article aims to challenge whether marriage is actually individualized by using a new institutional perspective. Two main questions are asked: how common is couple integration and interdependence in marriage today and whether there is evidence that proves that marriage is individualized. The authors first review a few of indicators of individualization (i.e. Common economic pool, rate of voluntary childlessness, divorce rate, living pattern, gendered labor) and argue that it is more important to examine the actual behaviors the married spouses have done. Instead of claiming that married couples are living “alone together” proposed by Amato et al (2007), the authors conclude that more attention should be paid to data which shows that the majority of spouses engage in interdependent and integrated behaviors and the trend that marriage is individualized is not clear. Marriage as an institution does not change easily due to “institutional isomophrism.”