Marriage-as-gendered-institution thesis

This theory views heterosexual marriage as a social institution with widely shared cultural understandings and emphasizes that those cultural understandings are gendered.

There are gendered ideas around what it means to be a husband or a wife, mother or father, this theory posits, and thus violation of these gendered norms may lead to decreased social support for heterosexual couples and/or spouse's becoming dissatisfied with the relationship, according to Sayer et al.