Do marriages forget their past? Marital stability in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia.
This paper assesses the impact of three main destabilizing factors on marital stability in Cambodia: the radical reformation of marriage under the Khmers Rouges (KR); the imbalanced gender ratio among marriageable adults resulting from gendered mortality during the KR regime; and, after decades of isolation from the West, a period of rapid social change. Although there is evidence of declining marital stability in the most recent period, marriages contracted under the KR appear as stable as adjacent marriage cohorts. Thesefindings suggest that the conditions under which spouses were initially paired matter less for marital stability than does their contemporaneous environment.
Population Research Center, NORC and the University of Chicago, IL 60637, USA. pheuveli@midway.uchicago.edu
Patrick
P
Heuveline
Bunnak
B
Poch
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002160:Cambodia; D015331:Cohort Studies; D003625:Data Collection; D003710:Demography; D004243:Divorce; D005260:Female; D017144:Focus Groups; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010549:Personal Satisfaction; D018454:Spouses