愛情要門當戶對?marry up or marry down?

The rules of discussing class in Britain are, pleasingly, very like those of cricket. Once you know them, they seem incredibly obvious and intuitive and barely worth mentioning; if you don't know them, they are pointlessly, sadistically complicated, their exclusivity almost an exercise in snobbery in its own right.

在英國討論階級，令人愉快地就像板球的那些事。一旦你瞭解他們，他們似乎是令人難以置信的明顯和直觀，幾乎不值一提；如果你不知道他們，他們毫無意義、殘酷地複雜，他們的排他性在自己的權利範圍內幾乎是一個勢利行徑。

Nowhere is this more evident and yet more tacit than in relationships: people marry into their own class. It's called "assortative mating". You know this by looking around, yet there's such profound squeamishness about it that research tends to cluster around class proxies. The question goes: "Do you and your spouse share the same educational attainment?" (Translation: are you the same class?) Or: "Did you go to the same university?" (Translation: are you really, really the same class?)

沒有哪比這更明顯了，但在戀愛中更是心照不宣：人們選擇門當戶對的人結婚。這就是所謂的“同類配對”。你通過四處張望知道這些，但關於它如此嚴重地吃毛求疵以至於研究往往集中在階級替代物周圍。問題就到了：“你和你的配偶擁有相同的學歷嗎？”（言外之意：你們是同一階層的嗎？）或者說：“你們去了同一所大學嗎？”（言外之意：你們真的、真的是同一階層嗎？）

This trend is immune to social progress elsewhere. If anything, people are more likely than ever to marry into their own class, as a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research showed this year. Of people born in 1958, just over a third of women had a partner from the same class as themselves: 38% married up, while 23% married down. For those born in 1970, 45% married into the same class; of those born between 1976 and 1981, 56% married into the same class, with a far smaller proportion (16%) marrying up.

這種趨勢在社會進步的其他方面是免疫的。如果有什麼的話，人們比以往任何時候都更願意嫁進自己的階層，從公共政策研究學院今年的一份報告顯示。出生於1958年的人，剛剛超過三分之一的女性有一個來自他們自己階層的伴侶：38％嫁入上層，而23％嫁入下層。對於那些1970年出生的人，45％嫁到同一個階層，而在1976年和1981年之間出生的人有56%與同階層的人結婚，更小比例（16％）的人嫁入上層。

Even the phrases "marrying up" and "marrying down" are sullying to use. You can't really escape the connotation that the rich are better than the poor. But I use them anyway, putting them in the grammatical equivalent of surgical gloves, because there is no right-on alternative: there's no unsnobbish way to convey a difference in class between two people. The leftwards path is to pretend class doesn't exist. Which is fine, but it's also total horse manure.

儘管短語“嫁入上層”和“嫁入下層”帶侮辱地使用。你真的不能逃避富人比窮人更好的言外之意。但我無論如何使用他們，把他們置於外科手術手套的語法地位，因爲沒有正確的替代，還是沒有不勢力的方式來表達兩個人之間的階級差異。向左走是假裝階級不存在。這很好，但它也是完全的馬屁。