A Marriage Therapist's Blog

 

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Posts Tagged ‘living together’


Mar 03

New Data on Cohabitating

By Jay Slupesky
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Interesting article in the newspapers today. Research just published by the National Center for Health Statistics indicates that couples who lived together before they were married are less likely to stay married. In fact, couples who cohabitated are 6% less likely to have their marriage last ten years or longer.

I’m sure this will be hard for many people to believe. Young people tend to think that they should live together for a year or more to insure that they are compatible before they commit to marriage.

My two cents on this topic is that we should not be too hasty to assume cause and effect here. (Or as my professors used to say, don’t confuse correlation with causation.)  I’m not disputing the data that there exists a correlation between living together before marriage and a reduced length of marriage.  But we cannot conclude that cohabitation causes a marriage to be less stable.  Perhaps both of these things are caused by some other factor.  For example, I would guess that people who feel less strongly about the “sanctity of marriage” would be more likely to move in together without being married, and would also be quicker to “pull the plug” on a marriage when things got rough.