What can we learn from looking at married partners who live apart? In Commuter Spouses, Danielle Lindemann explores how couples cope when they live apart to meet the demands of their dual professional careers. Based on the personal stories of almost one-hundred commuter spouses, Lindemann shows how these atypical relationships embody (and sometimes disrupt!) gendered constructions of marriage in the United States. These narratives of couples who physically separate to maintain their professional lives reveal the ways in which traditional dynamics within a marriage are highlighted even as they are turned on their heads. Commuter Spouses follows the journeys of these couples as they adapt to change and shed light on the durability of some cultural ideals, all while working to maintain intimacy in a non-normative relationship.

Lindemann suggests that everything we know about marriage, and relationships in general, promotes the idea that couples are focusing more and more on their individual and personal betterment and less on their marriage. Commuter spouses, she argues, might be expected to exemplify in an extreme manner that kind of self-prioritization. Yet, as this book details, commuter spouses actually maintain a strong commitment to their marriage. These partners illustrate the stickiness of traditional marriage ideals while simultaneously subverting expectations.

About the Author

Danielle Lindemann is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University. She has a husband and a feisty preschooler. Currently, they all live together.

Reviews

An extraordinary, original, and seminal work of meticulous and rigorous scholarship, "Commuter Spouses: New Families in a Changing World" is an unreservedly recommended and core addition to college and university library Contemporary American Sociology collections in general, and Modern Marriage, Family, and Labor Relations supplemental curriculum studies lists in particular.

* Midwest Book Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9781501731181
Author Danielle Lindemann
Format Paperback
Page Count 198
Imprint ILR Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 11mm