A look at a popular trend and its effect on marriage

I’ll never forget when our organization sold a parcel of land we had subdivided here in East Texas. The buyers were a couple who had been living together for about ten years. It appeared they had children together. Although not legally married, they now had joint liability for the loan. They also had joint ownership of the land and the house they were to build on it. I don’t know if they considered themselves in a state of cohabitation. Alternatively, they might have considered it to be their definition of marriage. Either way, the commitments ended up being the same.

Cohabitation is a fairly recent but hugely popular arrangement prior to marriage and for some, a substitute for marriage. It has become the standard way for many young and not so young adults to test drive a potential marriage before ‘buying the car’. A 2019 study by the Pew Research Center found that “While the share (of adults) who are currently cohabiting remains far smaller than the share who are married, the share of adults ages 18 to 44 who have ever lived with an unmarried partner (59%) has surpassed the share who has ever been married (50%).” This represents a huge shift in attitudes from just a few years ago. The ‘try before you buy’ has become conventional wisdom. Makes sense, right?

However, that same study showed that, “married adults express higher levels of satisfaction, trust and closeness than those who are living with a partner.”

Another study in the Wall Street Journal states,

In looking at the marital histories of thousands of women across the U.S., we found that women who cohabited were 15% more likely to get divorced. Moreover, a Stanford study indicates that the risk is especially high for women who cohabited with someone besides their future husband. They were more than twice as likely to end up in divorce court.

So, while the majority of young adults believe that living together prior to marriage is the best way to prepare for marriage, the research shows otherwise. Why is that?

That same study in the Wall Street Journal suggests several reasons:

• First, experience in cohabiting often leads to experience in breaking up — a pattern that may be more easily repeated in marriage.

• Second, experience in cohabitation may encourage comparison of a spouse with former roommates. Judging a spouse with a “you’re not as good as” mindset may more easily lead a couple before another kind of judge.

• Third, living like husband and wife, without being husband and wife, calls into question the uniqueness of marriage in the first place.

In an article titled, Why cohabitation isn’t good preparation for marriage, author Champ Thornton offers this insight,

Cohabitation and marriage are also different in their results. Living together without marital commitment feeds the need to perform. Each potential spouse is always on audition for the big show. After all, there’s no pretest without a test — without evaluation. The so-called “freedom” of cohabitation forges its own kind of chains — the shackles of performance. If I mess up, this could be over.

Another common belief today about raising the odds of having a successful marriage is that it’s better to wait until you are older and more mature – now the average age is around 30. This also gives time for both higher education and the development of a career. However, for women, this is a double edged sword, as their fertility rate and ease of childbirth declines dramatically after the age of 30. Interestingly, that same WSJ article quotes another compelling statistic,

As we recently discovered, however, there is an interesting exception to the idea that waiting until 30 is best. In analyzing reports of marriage and divorce from more than 50,000 women in the U.S. government’s National Survey of Family Growth (NFSG), we found that there is a group of women for whom marriage before 30 is not risky: women who married directly, without ever cohabiting prior to marriage. In fact, women who married between 22 and 30, without first living together, had some of the lowest rates of divorce in the NSFG.

So, the data continues to contradict popular myths – that it’s better to live together first, and that it’s better to wait to get married. In fact, one of the reasons people do live together first is that our bodies were made to be sexually active in our late teens and early twenties, historically when most people got married and started families. Since we’ve been convinced that it’s better to wait, we decide to attempt the benefits of marriage without the commitment. However, as in the case of the couple at the beginning of this article, the commitments come anyway. Financial commitments. Children.

A number of studies also indicate that those who choose not to cohabit before marriage are “disproportionately religious”, as are those who tend to marry younger. They seem to exhibit a moral compass that enables them to enter into marriage without the fears that plague the larger populace. The entirety of our writing – our articles and books, are about demonstrating the superiority of the Christian worldview. God ordained the commitment of marriage, not the arrangement of playing house. It is only our arrogance that causes us to imagine we know better. The data tells us we do not.