Is there any one picture that adequately captures the DINK persona? Can we say for sure the type of person who could be labeled DINK? In short: no. Clearly, after learning only a little bit of the personal information about the participants in this chapter their diversity shines through; these are unique individuals who all happen to be DINK. The individuals and
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couples I researched had grown up in a variety of settings, in a number of different states, in conservative and liberal households. Some were driven to climb the career ladder, others focused on giving back to the community. For some, staying at home, snuggling, and
watching television made them happy, but others yearned for jungle-trek in the Yucatan. One thing is for sure: being DINK does not automatically typecast you as the money-grubbing power couple from the movies of the 1980s. In the end, there is no typical way of performing Dual Income No Kids.
The term is problematic for other reasons. Namely, the couples I researched, although fitting the criteria, do not necessarily embrace the term with open arms. After asking each of the couples directly whether they identified with being DINK, many participants had an uneasy relationship with, or acceptance of the term. They acknowledged that they fit the category in theory, but they did not connect strongly with the label. Through my discussions with them it became clear that they were not choosing consciously to be a DINK, like a person would claim to be a feminist. In fact, many had not even heard the term before reading the research materials that I produced, and realized that in fact they met the criteria.
Instead, these couple were making choices based on the activities and goals that helped them live what they seemed to present as a more authentic or satisfying life. Some are aware of really “waiting”, depending on their ages and orientations, and others feel like they are just waiting for the “right” time that has not come yet, and has not come for their peers of the same age either. Still others plan to forgo having children entirely. For most, having children was a goal, but one that they felt they could delay until achieving some of the others on their life list were accomplished. In their minds, it was not one or the other; they could achieve both.
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So it is not to say that these individuals are so unique that they have no commonalties, as I observed before, but they, as a group, express less of an aversion to having kids so much as their efforts to get other things done first are the priority. As I discuss further in the next chapters, we need to look at DINK not in terms of why do not they want to have kids? But rather – why are they timing it this way? They do not share one explanation for this, but their shared focus on “finishing other things first” is striking, as I discuss in greater depth in the next two chapters. In the end, what we are really looking at, then, is not “why they wait” but why the childbearing age for many married, double-income couples has settled into this “later” pattern.
Because of this realization, I would actually argue that for most people Dual Income No Kids is not an identity at all, but a period of time that is organically created by the couple themselves, a phase that is gaining more and more acceptance by Americans and developing countries around the world. This mirrors the argument that Whithead and Popenoe put forth, “the childless years post marriage are becoming a life stage in their own right” (2008:7). I take this argument a step further and propose that this newly established life phase is not designed to delay having children for “selfish” reasons as Moynihan might put it, but is understood as providing the couple with time to prepare adequately for children. I will discuss this concept, one actually accepted and perpetuated by the couples themselves, in greater detail in Chapter Four.
To reiterate, the real question is not “Who is DINK?”, but “Why is DINK?”—why specifically do so many of these people feel the need to insert DINK in between marriage and children, rather than have children right away, or earlier, like the majority of people in the United States? We could assume that broad social changes as seen in the social statistics I
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presented in Chapter One, like more women in the workplace or financial pressures from the recession, are influencing this phase. In part, structural forces do play a role. We must also understand how people’s personal prerogatives create DINK. Socioeconomics might predict to some extent and professional engagements are part of the picture, but we cannot really understand DINK just in terms of demographics. We need to look at their personal stories and how they describe their decisions. After all, “making a decision about parenthood is not just making a decision about the objective aspects of timing and arrangements: it also involves facing a series of intensely personal issues having to do with our own past and future” (Cohen: 1985:7). The values and choices they make as they negotiate a life course that seems “right” to them provide the real picture of what it means to being DINK.
In the next two chapters I will introduce the main themes that research participants mentioned as influencing their family planning. These concern their values, priorities, and the way they frame childbearing based on the role models in their lives, as well as their more personal motivations for being Dual Income No Kids. In doing so I hope to flesh out what it means to be DINK in America.
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