Men from poor backgrounds are twice as likely to be single as those from rich families, research has found.
They were also likely to earn less by the time they reached middle age, as well as marry women with lower incomes.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), which carried out the research, said the trends made poverty more likely to continue down the generations.
The study found that a third of men born in 1970 to the poorest fifth of families did not live with a partner in 2012. That compared with one in seven from rich backgrounds.
The IFS also said that men from low-income households were twice as likely to be divorced as their high-income counterparts, and nearly twice as likely to never have been married.
Richer men were also more likely to have higher-earning partners, bringing in on average 73 per cent more than the partners of men from poorer families.
As women's earnings are an increasingly important part of a household's income, these trends significantly reduce the household incomes of men who grew up in poor families compared with those of men who grew up in rich families, the IFS said.
The report suggested this is quite a "new divide". Among men born 12 years earlier, the differences in partnership status and partner earnings by family background were considerably smaller, the IFS said.
Chris Belfield, a research economist at the IFS and an author of the paper, said: “Focusing solely on the earnings of men in work understates the importance of family background in determining living standards.
“As well as having higher earnings, those from richer families are more likely to be in work, more likely to have a partner and more likely to have a higher-earning partner than those from less well-off backgrounds.
“And all these inequalities have been widening over time.”
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