Over the years, becoming married has become less popular. For example, studies tell us that “Those who are 25 – 34 years old are most likely choosing to cohabit versus getting married.” What’s the big deal with this? How does this information affect you? How is it changing or going to change society?
This article is all about the research findings of cohabitation before marriage.
What is cohabitation?
Cohabitation means living together before marriage. It is a practice where a couple decides to share a residence and live together before officially and legally getting married. This arrangement has become increasingly common in modern societies.
People choose to live together before marriage for a variety of reasons, and these reasons can be influenced by cultural, societal, economic, and personal factors.
Some common motivations can be some of the following reasons. Testing to see how compatible they will be in a shared living space. Wanting a deeper emotional bond. Seeking financial benefits of being able to split living expenses. Not viewing sex as sacred.
How cohabitation hurts marriages:
Those who cohabit, believe that they can have sex and then believe that things will be okay (or there won’t be any real consequences) for being involved in these sorts of actions.
Once the couple chooses to legally get married, the research shows that their marriage has an elevated risk of divorce. The following articles explain why.
Resources:
Society’s views on cohabitation have changed a lot. Has cohabitation’s link to divorce changed as well?
- “Cohabitation may confer “short-term benefits” in the sense that divorce risk is lower for these couples right after the wedding (within the first 6 months) and slightly lower in the subsequent 6 months. During that initial year, couples that did not live together first are at higher risk for divorce. Maybe cohabitators have less of an abrupt transition after marriage, and this gives them an initial advantage. However, the tide turns after that first year, and people who cohabitated before marriage end up having elevated risk relative to those who did not.” – Theresa DiDonato, Ph.D., is a social psychologist and a professor of psychology at Loyola University Maryland.
- This article also states the same research from the research study in greater detail. HERE. – Premarital Cohabitation Is Still Associated With Greater Odds of Divorce
HERE. – Cohabitation Experience and Cohabitation’s Association With Marital Dissolution
HERE. – The Risks for Couples Moving in Together
Relationship Risks Associated with Cohabitation
- “Those who start cohabiting before deciding to marry report lower average marital quality and are more likely to divorce. This added risk is compounded by the fact that most couples slide into cohabiting rather than make a clear decision about what it means and what their futures may hold.” – Complied Research Studies
What is the best age to get married?
For example, studies tell us that “Those who are 25 – 34 years old are most likely choosing to cohabit versus getting married.”
- “It’s a question that weighs especially heavily on educated women, who find themselves caught between their career ambitions and pressure to settle down and start a family. The conventional wisdom is that they should get launched professionally in their 20s and wait until 30 or after to marry. Then they can establish themselves as independent adults before finding and pairing with an equally successful partner. This strategy is also supposed to maximize their odds of a lasting bond because the conventional wisdom also holds that early marriage increases the risk of divorce. The thinking goes that, if you wait until 30 or later to marry, you’re much more likely to have the maturity required both to make a good choice and to be a good spouse. The fact that the median age at first marriage for American women is now almost 29 (it’s 30 for men)—and higher still among those with at least a college degree—suggests that this view is widely held.”
Is it too risky to get married in your 20s?
“Although teens still face an elevated divorce risk relative to older adults, my analysis of more recent data shows that those who tie the knot after their early thirties are now more likely to divorce than those who marry in their late twenties.”
“For instance, someone who marries at 25 is over 50 percent less likely to get divorced than is someone who weds at age 20. Most youthful couples simply do not have the maturity, coping skills, and social support it takes to make marriage work. In the face of routine marital problems, teens and young twenty-somethings lack the wherewithal necessary for happy resolutions.” – HERE
However, although this research may make you by its wording that it’s best to not get married until their later twenties or around thirty, it doesn’t go into the exception that those who chose not to cohabit were fine to get married in their twenties.
There is a spike because the study didn’t include that getting married around 30 meant that the couples were most likely cohabitating.
“When it comes to divorce, the research has generally backed up the belief that it’s best to wait until around 30 to tie the knot. The sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger of the University of Utah found that women who got married “too early” (mid-20s or earlier) were more likely to break up than their peers who married close to age 30.”
Too Risky to Wed in Your 20s? Not If You Avoid Cohabiting First:
“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.”
HERE is the article.
Does the Act of Marriage (Still) Make a Difference?:
Some of the thoughts young singles may have…
“After all, marriage rates have been falling across the developed world since the 1970s. Cohabitation has become normalized.”
“So do we need marriage? Are the poor leading the way by abandoning it? Are the rich hanging on to marriage as some kind of status symbol? Is marriage permanently dented, or is it just going through a bad patch?”
“What I want to do is restore your confidence in marriage. I want to reassure you that the statistics continue to show that families who marry tend to have better outcomes, both adults and children, both rich and poor alike. But most of all I want to explain why the act of marriage makes a difference. What is it about marriage that reinforces and enhances commitment? What is the psychology of marriage?”
So, marriage helps couples stay together. It also benefits children.
Read the study and resource with the quotes HERE.
Does Getting Married Really Make You Happier?
“Gallup polls and the General Social Survey (GSS) alike show that fewer Americans believe marriage is key to happiness, or that it’s important for lifelong romantic partners to marry.”
“Despite changing public views, the truth is married people really are happier.”
This quote is one I found particularly interesting because it is based on one of the reasons why I started better-to-gather in the first place. To nurture our closest relationships to us – marriage, family, and friendships.
“One other change should be mentioned: friendship. One reason many people today believe marriage is not vital for happiness is the rise of “chosen family” and the idea that a close circle of friends can substitute for more traditional kinds of relationships. The GSS provides no support for this idea. When people reported increased frequency of “social evenings spent with friends,” even large increases, there was essentially no associated change in happiness. This doesn’t mean that friendship is irrelevant for happiness, of course, especially since “social evenings spent with friends” is a very crude measure of true friendship. But this does suggest that, at the high level, filling your life with game nights and book clubs and outings with friends is unlikely to yield as much happiness as marriage. There simply is no substitute for marriage.”
See the results of the study, and the above quote, HERE.
The Research Proves The #1 Social Justice Imperative Is Marriage:
“Marriage Boosts Every Measure Of Human Well-Being: A consistent and irrefutable mountain of research has shown, reaching back to the 1970s and beyond, that marriage strongly boosts every important measure of well-being for children, women, and men.”
HERE is the article.
Do married adults make more money than unmarried adults?
- Yes. HERE is the data. (Figure 2)
My Thoughts
My friend, Kelly, told me something that stuck with me! I was dating a lot in college and throughout my high school years. She told me once when I was talking to her about my latest dating experience, “You either get married to them or you break up.”
Isn’t that true in life?
We can learn so much from each person that crosses our path too. Even if we don’t get married to them, we can take the experiences we learned from them and become a better person.
An amazing book on this topic for when a breakup does happen is this: (A breakup many times can feel close to your heart like a death.)
If you read it and find you love it too, I would love to hear what you learned!
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