Impacts of the Financial Crisis on Family Trajectories: The Case of Living Together Apart Couples

Family trajectories and transitions, union formation and dissolution, are strongly linked to or framed by economic and cultural context. In that perspective, family life has to be considered more as a result or the expression of contextual parameters than a universal phenomenon that could be looked at isolated from these parameters (like work conditions, economic assets, etc).

The 2008 financial crisis and its consequences on housings revealed in different countries such a relationship between external macroeconomic factors and family transitions: the case of couples who continue to live together while considering themselves to be separated. We have studied in parallel some of these “living together apart” situations in USA and France with Andrew Cherlin and Caitlin Cross-Barnet. We have collected in different social classes, the main arguments delivered by people concerned with such situations of forced cohabitation. Among them, we identify situations where residential separation is not possible, either because of the need to keep up appearances, often for the children's sake, or because total separation is too frightening or living in separate homes is unaffordable.

In this contribution, we want to go beyond a typology of these situations to use them as a mean to compare our respective national family culture concerning marriage, divorce, cohabitation. France and USA are effectively two very different nations regarding family issues. The common economic trauma of the financial crisis that we are still facing in our respective countries is an occasion to reveal these cultural dimensions.