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Moving In Before Marriage No Longer a Bad Omen?
I'd heard a theory before that the reason premarital cohabiting correlated to an increase in divorce rates was because one party wound up feeling pressured to marry. It seems that this new study would fit in with that theory.
Nearly half of first marriages break up within 20 years, a new government study finds. With those odds, you might wonder: Would we be better off living together first?
The new research, part of a marriage survey of 22,000 men and women, suggests times have changed from the days when living together signaled poor chances for a successful marriage later.
"It's not playing as big a role in predicting divorce as it used to," said Casey Copen, lead author of the study.
Living together before marriage has been a long-growing trend. In the late 1960s, only about 10 percent of U.S. couples moved in together first, and they ended up with higher divorce rates.
Today, about 60 percent of couples live together before they first marry.
"It's becoming so common, it's not surprising it no longer negatively affects marital stability," said Wendy Manning, co-director of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked for trends in first marriages. They interviewed men and women ages 15 to 44 during the years 2006 to 2010. About 40 percent were married.
The study found those who were engaged and living together before the wedding were about as likely to have marriages that lasted 15 years as couples who hadn't lived together.
But what about the couples who were living together but weren't engaged? The new study found marriage was less likely to survive to the 10- and 15-year mark among couples who weren't engaged when they lived together findings similar to earlier research.
For example, for women, there was about a 60 percent likelihood a marriage would survive 15 years if the couple either hadn't lived together before the wedding or were engaged while they were sharing the same living space.
But if no firm marriage commitment was made while she and her boyfriend were living together, the likelihood the marriage would last 15 years fell to 53 percent. The numbers were similar for men.
Potential explanations include more lax attitudes about commitment, lower education levels or family histories that made these couples more pessimistic about marriage, Copen said.
The experience of living together before marriage is different for different people, said Richard Settersten Jr., an Oregon State University professor of human development and family science.
Some young people put off marriage because they're pursuing a college education and starting a career. For them, "cohabitation is a trial marriage, usually without kids, that often ends in marriage," Settersten said.
Others in many cases, people not on a college track move from one living-together relationship to another, some of them producing children, he said.
Commitment has made a difference. In interviews with some women who have been married 20 years or more after living with their spouse first, firm belief in a future together was a common theme.
"I sort of knew he would be part of my life long-term.... I wasn't thinking, `He's moving in with me, is he ever going to marry me?"' said Hillary Mickell, a San Francisco woman who first moved in with her husband when they were students at Boston University.
But this was in 1985, and she did try to hide their situation from her parents in California, sometimes telling them her beau answered the phone because there had been a snowstorm and he was stuck in her apartment. "It became a running joke there are blizzards in Boston nine months a year," said Mickell, co-founder of a social network site for recipe exchanges.
The CDC study also concluded:
Nearly half of first marriages will break up within 20 years a statistic identical to what other studies have found.
The percentage of young women currently living with a male partner grew from 3 percent in 1982 to 11 percent recently.
Women and men with bachelor's degrees were more likely to delay marriage but also more likely to eventually get married and stayed married for at least 20 years.
Asian women were the most likely to be in a first marriage that lasted at least 20 years. Nearly 70 percent of Asian women were still in their first marriage, compared to 54 percent of white women, 53 percent of Hispanic women and 37 percent of black women.
Among men, 62 percent of Hispanics were still in their first marriage at 20 years, compared to 54 percent of whites and 53 percent of blacks. The study did not have statistics for Asian men.
Re: Moving In Before Marriage No Longer a Bad Omen?
Potential explanations include more lax attitudes about commitment, lower education levels or family histories that made these couples more pessimistic about marriage, Copen said.
I wonder if finances come into play. You move in together because it's cheaper to have 2 people paying rent. Because you don't have much money, you can't afford a big wedding. So you don't get married. And the stresses of finances take their toll on your relationship.
I do know a lot of people who have moved in together because "it's so much cheaper" or "he's here all the time anyway." My attitude was, "this is a big next step in our relationship." (Not that it wasn't cheaper and more convenient!)
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I think the issue I have with studies like this is the negative connotation of divorce and the positive connotation of staying married. If people are marrying because they feel pressured, then I'm fine with high divorce rates. If people are staying together in bad relationships because divorce is taboo/impossible for them, then I'm not fine with high rates of staying married.
I'll second this. I wonder why these studies never address the idea that couples who are very traditional and religious would be unlikely to live together, but also unlikely to divorce even if the marriage completely sucks.
I would also think that finances play a huge role in the decision to live together, which is highly unfortunate in some ways, but totally practical. I would have loved to live on my own longer but it made financial sense to live with DH.
I think that some people also want 'a trial run' to see if they can co-habitate well. I mean, you can be totally in love with someone but then live with them and realize it sucks.
I wish these studies would look at marital satisfaction rather than divorce rates. Personally, I care a lot more about being happy than staying married. Which is not to say I'm not committed to my marriage, but I'm committed to it because of my faith that DH is good for me in the long term, not because I think divorce is fundamentally wrong.
I also wish they would separate out the reasons that people live together more. It's not terribly surprising that couples who have already made solid plans to marry see similar results whether they move in together before or after the wedding. But I also know people who move in together (for fun, to save money, etc) knowing they are not sure enough about the future of the relationship to get married or engaged, and end up settling because the barriers to leave get too high. And I know there are people who live together before making a commitment because they want the additional information about one another that only comes from living together, but a least try to keep the barriers to exit low in case they don't feel well matched for cohabitation. Conventional wisdom says the last kind of couple is the biggest problem as far as divorce rates go, since it's hard to shift from having one foot out the door to being committed, but personally I think the conventional wisdom is wrong. It would be really interesting to find out...
Of course, figuring out why people are living together can be a challenge. Even the two people in the relationship might not agree. And even just one person might give a different reason the day they move in than the day they file for divorce. Certainly that's been my experience with people I know personally.