The coronavirus pandemic created a new way of living, working, and socializing, and has added new challenges for couples and parents. However, that doesn’t appear to be affecting Americans’ satisfaction with those relationships, according to recently releasedsurvey results.
Among married or cohabitating adults, 53% responded to the Pew Research Centersurvey that things in their marriage or relationship are currently going very well, and an additionally 37% said things were going fairly well. Only about 9% said their relationship is not too well or not well at all.
These numbers, given in October 2020, are nearly identical to responses given to the same questions in 2019, well before the coronavirus was first reported.
With all that time at home, it’s hard to overlook when household chores are not done. According to the survey, during the pandemic, more than half of men are feeling really good about how the household chores are divided up.
In the 2020 survey, 55% of married or cohabitating men said they are very satisfied with how chores are divided. In 2019, that response was only given by 49% of men. Women have different thoughts, in 2019 39% of married or cohabitating women said they are very satisfied with how household chores are divided up, and that number remained steady in 2020.
While men feel better about how chores are divided, 59% of women said in 2020 that they do more chores than their spouse or partner, and about 34% said they believe chores are divided about equally.
Men’s perception, according to the survey, 46% responded the chores are divided equally, and 34% admitted their spouse or partner does more.
The stay-at-home orders and remote learning may have helped parents feel like they are spending the “right” amount of time with their kids. More men and women responded they spend the “right” amount of time with their children in 2020, compared to a similar survey in 2017.
In 2017, 53% of women said they were spending the “right” amount of time with their kids, in 2020, that percentage jumped to 58% of women.
For men, the increase was larger. In 2017, only about 36% of men thought they were spending the “right” amount of time with their kids, and in 2020, that jumped to 46%.
The 2020 survey was conducted by the Pew Research Center in mid-October 2020, and involved more than 10,000 adults around the country.
