Cohabiting Before Marriage Tends to Predict Marital Dissatisfaction and Divorce
Beginning in the late 1960s many people began to believe that cohabiting before marriage was advisable. It was kind of the "test-drive" theory of marital relations--you take your partner out for a 'spin' before deciding whether to 'buy.'
This article reports on two new surveys which contradict this notion. Both are authored by Galena Rhoades of the University of Denver and published in the Journal of Family Issues and the Journal of Family Psychology (Fox News, 7/15/09).
The authors surveyed 1,000 people who were married. Some of them had cohabited before marrying and some hadn't. Those who had reported markedly lower satisfaction with their relationships than those who hadn't. They were also more likely to split up than those who hadn't lived together prior to marriage.
The reasons for this are complex, but they seem to involve passivity on the part of the individuals. For example, people who move in together, likely accumulate things in common such as a house, personal property or pets. And it is their unwillingness to split those things up, rather than a strong romantic commitment to the other person, that nudges them into marriage.
The 'test-drive' theory of cohabiting tends to predict failure too:
"Cohabiting to test a relationship turns out to be associated with the most problems in relationships," Rhoades said. "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."
Cohabiting is common in the United States among young couples. Rhoades and her team estimate that as many as 70% of couples live together before marrying.
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