OK, married people, go ahead and roll your eyes. An Australian study found that it takes a lot more than just love to keep a marriage together. Still, the study came up with a few interesting tidbits, such as:
Children also influence the longevity of a marriage or relationship, with one-fifth of couples who have kids before marriage — either from a previous relationship or in the same relationship — having separated compared to just nine percent of couples without children born before marriage.
That’s a big difference, and I’m tempted to go read more to see if they have a theory that explains it, even though I’m not fluent in Social Scientese (what on earth are “time-varying covariates” anyway?). Anyone wants to indulge my inner lazy person and tackle this for me?
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Andrea adds: Then there’s this, showing once again (there’s a consensus on this in the science already) that couples who live together before marriage fare worse in marriage. Thought this was interesting:
Cohabiting to test a relationship turns out to be associated with the most problems in relationships,” Rhoades says. “Perhaps if a person is feeling a need to test the relationship, he or she already knows some important information about how a relationship may go over time.”
Don’t know if that helps, Brigitte.
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Brigitte thinks: That was more or less my guess about co-habitating, but I’m still puzzled a bit about the kids part. I understand that bringing kids from a previous relationship into a new one creates its own set of challenges, but I didn’t think couples who have kids together before getting married would get similar separation rates. I rather thought having kids together was kind of a step up from “testing”, no? And it still doesn’t work? That’s one important piece of paper, marriage is…
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Tanya hates to play Devil’s advocate: however, nearly everyone I know who does not live together before marriage does so because either culturally or religiously, it’s a standard they had set for their lives. These same cultures/religions also have in common an understanding of enduring through difficulties in marriage. So I wouldn’t say that cohabitation is the primary earmark for a higher likelihood of divorce. I’d venture to suggest that most of those who live together only once married have been given lifelong examples by family/culture/religious community of how to make marriage work. These individuals are basically far better equipped to face marriage.
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Andrea doesn’t want to nitpick: but does your point Tanya actually detract from the evidence, or merely help explain what we know to be true? Sure, cohabiting couples do so precisely because they don’t have the same cultural/religious standards as those who don’t live together before marriage. That doesn’t change the fact that in most cases, couples live together with an eye to seeing if they could get married, considering it an important step on that road. Would they do so if they knew it decreased their chances of marital success?
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Tanya responds: See, that’s the thing. It’s not necessarily the cohabitation that decreases their chances of success in subsequent marriage. I think the cohabitation is a symptom, not a cause, of a generation that increasingly places less value upon marital vows.
There’s this cute song by The Proclaimers that goes: “But I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more, just to be the man who walked 1,000 miles to fall down at your door.” But, really, no one ever walks a thousand miles to fall down at his lover’s door. They’re just words used to express how one feels at that moment. And it’s how so many our day view wedding vows. “For better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health…until death parts us.” Great lyrics are a dime a dozen.
Simply NOT living with someone before entering into a marriage you are otherwise as unprepared for as the next guy will ensure nothing (I dare suggest).








Tanya makes a good point. I read that article yesterday too and that thought sort of passed through my mind without taking hold, so I’m glad to see it here. The article does state that it’s before engagement as well as marriage, so that kind of seems to say that it’s not co-habiting per se but the level of commitment to the relationship both partners have in the first place. I wonder if there are stats on common law relationships.
El, as an afterthought, I was actually wondering what the divorce rate was among the parents of these now cohabitating couples. My hypothesis is that their (the parents of the cohab couples) rate of divorce is higher. I’ve crossed several studies that reveal “that adult children of divorced parents are more likely to get divorced than those who come from intact families.” [http://www.familyresource.com/relationships/marriage/how-will-my-parents-divorce-affect-my-marriage]
I partially agree with Tanya that those who refuse to cohabit before marriage or before engagement are indicative of a particular world-view or value system wherein the living-together relationship is not to be taken lightly. They are self-selected in that sense.
On the other-side of it, I think no one is really performing a “test”. The costs of breaking-up while you’re living together are great, and it would actually become one more reason not to break up in the short-term, thus living-together pollutes the test. I wouldn’t be surprised if people moved-in together mostly out of convenience.
Anyways, I think that cohabiting to “test” a relationship does explicit harm to one’s chances of an enduring marriage. I think treating the living-together arrangement at any stage as a “test” creates the mindset that it is something you can escape from if it ceases to make you happy. They are treating the relationship as something that must prove it works to them, rather than as something they must make work themselves. People carry this mind-set into their marriage, because nothing signficantly changes when they decide to make things “official”. They are not taking a signficant step, they are just going with the flow. Consequently, cohabitation actually prevents them from making a difficult commitment of the will to make marriage work.
In short, cohabitation encourages an attitude that a commitment is only forth-coming when it is self-serving. This almost completely misses the point of marriage and poorly prepares people to make the kind of commitment that marriage requires.