Your grandmother might still consider it scandalous, but living together before marriage is more common than it’s ever been. Thirty years ago, people who cohabited were breaking some serious taboos, but today, research shows that up to 70 percent of marriages begin with the couples moving in together before they say their vows.
To today’s couples starting out, it seems like common sense: instead of jumping blindly into a lifetime commitment, why not test the waters first and make sure that you can live together peaceably? No one wants to find out after marriage that her husband’s refusal to do laundry is just too much to bear. Most people from Generation X and younger agree that it’s important to try things out in order to make stronger marriages, but many troubling studies have found that living together before marriage actually increases the odds that a couple will divorce. New research culled from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, however, disputes those findings. Cohabitation may not be the demon it’s made out to be, but it still doesn’t provide the assurance that many believe it does.
Commitment Versus Convenience
Data from numerous studies shows that people who live together before they get married have a slightly higher chance of getting divorced than couples who don’t move into a shared home until after they get engaged or married. The National Marriage Project also found that married couples who cohabited before their vows also tend to have more marital problems and report being less happy in their marriages. Although conservative and religious organizations may try to scare young people by claiming statistics like “four out of five cohabiting couples eventually divorce,” the reality is far more benign. The 2002 National Survey of Family Growth found that among men married for ten years, 71 percent of the noncohabiters were still married, while only 69 percent of the cohabiters were—a difference of only 2 percent.
Studies on premarital living arrangements are controversial because researchers haven’t verified whether cohabitation itself causes the uptick in divorce, or whether people who don’t live together are already less likely to divorce. Couples that don’t are far more likely to be religious, be socially conservative, or come from cultures where divorce is frowned upon, all of which lessen the likelihood of divorce. Many demographers believe that these characteristics are what lead to marital stability, not just the fact that they didn’t live together.
However, there’s also evidence that cohabitation itself is not good for some relationships. According to the author of a study at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, living together before marriage is something that, for many couples, “just sort of happens.” The author, Dr. Scott Stanley, believes that some couples end up living together out of convenience, without a clear vision of their future. People may think that it will be easy to get out of the relationship, but once finances are mingled and lives are combined, couples in a less-than-stellar relationship are less likely to break up, because of the hassle involved. They’re likely to slide into marriage the same way they slid into cohabitation. “Some people get trapped by that,” Dr. Stanley told the Washington Post. “Cohabitation may not be making some relationships more risky,” he said. “What it may be doing is making some risky relationships more likely to continue.”
Real Couples, Real Risks
This theory aligns with studies showing that there’s no difference between couples who move in together after their wedding and those who move in together after engagement. There’s also no increased risk for couples who decide to live together with a clear plan for a shared future. The couples that show an increased risk of divorce are those who decide to move in together purely for reasons of financial benefit or convenience, or because one partner wants the relationship to progress faster.
