When She Brings Home the Bacon: Breadwinning and the Sexual-emotional Lives of Cohabiting Couples

This paper explores linkages between cohabiting couples‘ relative income contributions and their emotional and sexual lives. Drawing on data from forty individual, in-depth interviews with both partners in 20 couples (n=40), our findings suggest that when women are the primary breadwinners, they also perform the majority of emotion work. While we do not find that female breadwinning couples emphasize traditional gender sexually, we do find less egalitarianism in sexual satisfaction and desire expressed among these couples. In contrast, in couples in which men are the primary breadwinners, relationships appear to be marked by greater equality in the emotional and sexual spheres. Although exploratory, our results suggest that the exclusion of the sexual-emotional domain from prior studies has likely underestimated the extent to which relationships remain gendered even among cohabiting couples.