It may seem strange now given the gay-rights advances of recent years, but there was a time, not too long ago, when a loud contingent of Americans seemed convinced that same-sex relationships posed a serious threat to the (obviously flawless) institution of heterosexual marriage, if not to family life in the United States as a whole.
These voices have mostly piped down since the peak of the Bush-era culture wars, and a recent study in the Journal of Marriage and Family — the “first nationally representative longitudinal study of same-sex couples,” in fact — highlights just how boringly normal circa-2014 gay couples are (non-paywalled draft PDF here).
In short, married or otherwise very-committed same-sex couples look a lot like their straight counterparts:
Once marriage and marriage-like unions are controlled for, same-sex couples and heterosexual couples have statistically indistinguishable rates of breakup[.] … Despite the fact that none of the same-sex couples in the United States in the 2009–2012 period enjoyed the same legal benefits and federal recognition as heterosexual married couples (because of the [Defense of Marriage Act, which was overturned in 2013]), the association between marriage and couple stability was similar for same-sex couples and for heterosexual couples[.]
In conclusion: yawn.
