As the trend of living with a
significant other
before
marriage
continues to increase among U.S. couples, sociologists warn doing so comes with an increased risk of
divorce
.
Marriage in the United States has
declined
while cohabitation and single status have become more prominent among young adults 25-34 years old, the
Washington Examiner
reported this week
.
Premarital cohabitation allows partners to live together without fully committing to one another, and the experience of cohabitation can affect one’s perception of marriage.
“When it comes to marriage, a lot of experience and a lot of relationships is linked to lower marital happiness and more divorce,” University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox told the Washington Examiner.
YOUNG AMERICANS SHOW DECLINE IN MARRIAGE AND FAMILY: STUDY
“Cohabitation is a kind of bridge relationship between being single and married,” he explained. “There’s this instinctive desire to couple up in the 20s. It makes complete sense, but people are feeling like, ‘Oh, my professional life isn’t nailed down. I’m going to grad school. I don’t really know if I’m fully committed to this person.’”
In that light, cohabitation makes logical sense to many young adults who view marriage as a “capstone” to a successful life rather than a “cornerstone” of attaining one. Many young adults use cohabitation as a means to “test” marriage to someone, and according to Wilcox, most marriages in the U.S. are preceded by cohabitation.
The practice brings with it the serious potential for marital failure, particularly when there have been multiple experiences with cohabitation.
“If you’ve had lots of experience breaking up with a serious partner, that gives you a sense of like a mini divorce, and it becomes a habit of sorts, potentially,” said Wilcox, director of UVA’s National Marriage Project.
Additionally, “people who have other cohabiting partners prior to marriage may compare their spouse on one or two dimensions unfavorably to a previous partner. … There can be kind of like these invidious comparisons that may be coloring your experience of married life.”
Studies have
shown
that premarital cohabitation has influenced people to have a more accepting view of divorce than prior to the experience.
While it is context-specific, “living in a union without legal commitment seems to make people regard a legal commitment as more disposable. People have also been shown to hold marriage in lower esteem after cohabiting,” according to a chapter on cohabitation and marriage by Catholic University professor Laurie DeRose.
Cohabitation also has the potential to lock persons into relationships with which they are unhappy.
Living together makes it easier to share things such as cellphone plans and get pets together and various other “constraints to parting.”
“Couples who have been living together for quite some time may prefer marrying over separating, without necessarily having the relationship quality that would warrant a marital commitment in the absence of such constraints,” DeRose’s chapter states. “In contrast, a decision to marry without having accumulated such constraints reflects more dedication to the relationship.”
Couples can “slide” into cohabitation and create an “inertia to remain in a relationship regardless of quality or fit,”
according
to University of Denver professor Scott Stanley.
“They’re living together, they’ve got a sofa together, they’ve got a puppy together,” Wilcox said. “Once they’ve done that, they’ve actually made it more difficult for them to call it off.”
“Sliding” is an unintended progression into cohabitation and marriage in which couples move in without having a serious conversation about what their relationship is, their aspirations for the future, or their thoughts on family and having children.
Given the noncommittal nature of cohabitation, consequences can be significant even before sliding into an incompatible marriage.
Cohabitation can create “asymmetrical commitment” because there is no clear intent, such as family, children, and marriage.
“The majority of cohabiting couples began living together without having any discussion about the transition,” DeRose’s chapter states. “A partner fully dedicated to a lasting relationship may push the issue of marriage, and the other with less dedication may agree to marry because the alternative of splitting is less attractive.”
Choosing the “lower-commitment option” opens the door for the more-committed partner to waste time on a relationship set for failure.
One instance Wilcox mentioned was a couple living together and having a five-year relationship. The woman wanted to have children and start a family, but the man would not commit to marriage.
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“He didn’t feel like he had any obligation to marry her, have kids with her,” he said. “So she basically wasted five years of her life with this guy. There wasn’t any kind of intentionality around [the relationship] because there was this lower-commitment option.”
“She lost her opportunity to, in this case, have kids because she ended up getting married later in life, but, at that point, it was too late to have children,” he said.
