The federal government has recently taken an unprecedented role in actively promoting marriage through social policies to address family instability and poverty in America. In 1996, Congress overhauled welfare policy to encourage work and marriage as routes to economic self-sufficiency for poor American families. This policy focus eventually led to the creation of the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative, a program that primarily funds relationship skills classes to promote marriage. Using ethnographic data from a community-based marriage education program for poor parents funded through a healthy marriage grant, I analyze how government-sponsored relationships skills classes intended to promote marriage tailor their messages for poor families. In doing so, this study addresses a broader sociological question: how does policy co-opt and transform ideas about love, family, and interpersonal commitment in the service of a particular political agenda? Moreover, how do parents accept, contest, and transform these ideologies on the ground when such ideas come up against the lived experience of families trying to create and maintain love while raising children in poverty? Ultimately, without addressing the structural issues that undermine poor couples’ aspirations to marry, relationship education frames healthy marriage as an emotional and economic partnership, one in which communication, conflict resolution, and financial management skills can be a social and psychological bulwark against the stresses of parenting in poverty.

In 1996, Congress overhauled welfare policy to encourage work and marriage as routes to economic self-sufficiency for poor American families. This led to the subsequent creation of the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI) in 2002. The HMI has funded hundreds of relationship skills and marriage education programs across the country, many targeting poor and low-income unmarried couples with children. To date, very little of the social scientific and policy debate over the value of such programs has focused on what relationship skills-based government-sponsored marriage promotion actually involves in practice. To address this gap, this dissertation draws on data collected data during an 18-month participant observation study of one federally-funded relationship skills program for low-income, unmarried parents called Thriving Families, including in-depth interviews with 60 program staff, instructors, and participants.

I find that Thriving Families couples delayed marriage because of a phenomenon I call curtailed commitment, the belief that if they cannot live up to middle-class ideas of family life, including meeting a specific economic threshold, couples are not equipped for marriage. Staff and instructors employed three primary strategies to encourage couples to overcome this reluctance: 1) rather than promoting marriage directly, they promoted a healthy co-parenting relationship, preferably within the context of marriage, as the best resource poor parents have to bolster their children's life chances; 2) they reframed what I call marital masculinity by suggesting that marriageable men are those who have the capacity to be caring co-parents and good communicators, qualities that do not depend on their ability to live up to middle-class norms of male breadwinning; and 3) they tried to teach parents financial management skills that would presumably enable them to have more money and communication skills to help them talk through relationship problems. Though economic constraints challenged their abilities to use the skills promoted by the program, parents viewed the classes as a rare opportunity to communicate free of the material constraints that overwhelmingly characterized their daily lives and their intimate relationships. This suggests that rather than promoting an instrumental view of marriage--that marriage prevents poverty--healthy marriage policy could likely better serve disadvantaged families by acknowledging and addressing the socioeconomic roots of curtailed commitment as part of public efforts to strengthen family relationships.