The H-Spot by Jill Filipovic

Author:Jill Filipovic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

In large part because of her history, Janet took her relationship with Rome slow and didn’t rush into marriage. But she was committed to him, and he to their family. A few days before I met with her, Janet and Rome had taken their children to the park. (“He has two biological kids but then he also claims his other daughter from his baby mama as well,” Janet told me. “I claim her too. So altogether we have seven kids.”) While they were walking, Janet noticed her son Jayvion starting to act out, clearly jealous of Rome’s other children. “So me and Rome, we were talking about it and Jayvion was like, ‘I’m gonna start calling Rome Daddy,’” Janet said. “And I told him, ‘That’s fine.’ Rome, he’s been in my life for three years and he made it clear to all three of my babies that he is not going nowhere.”

What stressed Janet and Rome out the most wasn’t their unusual family makeup; it was money. When they faced relationship strain, Janet said, it was largely because there just wasn’t enough to go around, and both adults were under enormous pressure. When I met with Janet in her home, she was optimistic about her future with Rome. A year and a half later, though, they had split up.

The strain finances and instability put on romantic relationships is a fixable problem, and improving the financial realities of those who are struggling would be much more helpful than getting them hitched. Most welfare benefits in the United States, though, are punitive, requiring recipients to work and penalizing recipients both for finding employment and for failing to, while also neglecting to provide child care or to fully treat education like work. Recipients are often required to demonstrate they are either working or looking for work, and have to meet with job counselors and case managers or risk losing their benefits; school or vocational program hours often don’t fully count as working hours, limiting the ability of women to move into more steady and remunerative jobs. Many socially conservative welfare reform advocates recognize that these sanction-based welfare systems create disincentives to marry and breed marital instability, but their aversion to welfare dwarfs their promotion of marriage. “The only way to eliminate the anti-marriage bias from welfare entirely would be to make all mothers eligible for these programs regardless of whether they are married and regardless of their husbands’ earnings,” wrote Rector and Purdue of the Heritage Foundation. “Structured in this way, the welfare system would be marriage-neutral: It would neither reward nor penalize marriage.” Still, they didn’t get on board, saying it would be too expensive. Instead, they wrote, “a more feasible strategy would be to experiment by selectively reducing welfare’s anti-marriage incentives to determine which penalties have the biggest behavioral impact.”49 In other words, play around with cutting benefits and keep the punitive structure in place; just see which cuts lead to more marriages and fewer divorces.

One social welfare program that did

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