Cohabitation and Commitment

“I commit to live with you ... for as long as it works out”

by Carolyn Moynihan | 30 Apr 2012 |  (1)

We have talked a fair bit on this website about cohabitation. Indeed, the custom of living together before marriage is now so widespread, and problematic, that even the New York Times recently carried a warning about its downside.


Young people, however, are going to take a lot of convincing that it is not the best way to prepare for marriage. Perhaps that's why the video above, posted on YouTube by someone called PastorPope, takes the viewer by the scruff of the neck and forces him/her to look at the sub-text of the cohabitors' contract.


Yes, it's a bit brutal, but maybe a wake-up call for some...
Thanks to Jennifer Minicus for passing this on.

click here to read whole article and make comments

The above is reposted here from the MercatorNet blog Family Edge.  


For contrast, consider the following, attributed to Goethe.  (The Goethe Society says "it is partly by Goethe, in a way."}

It helps explain the evidence that attitude of bride and groom to marriage is a key determinant of the longevity of the marriage.  In a culture where cohabitation and unilateral, no-fault divorce are normal and common, marriage itself is weakened and seen, to varying degrees, as provisional from the start.  Sadly, the high divorce rate is not just a fact but also reason for weak commitment and a kind of social self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back-- Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now." 

For a profound philosophical treatment of the issues, see the book by Karol Wojtyla (later John Paul II), Love and Responsibility.)

Cohabitation - It's Not the Same

One of the most pervasive myths about cohabitation, as I learned from the indignant reactions of graduate social work students to my introduction of the research evidence to the class, is that it is functionally as well as morally the equivalent of marriage.

"We don't need no piece of paper. From the city hall. Keeping us tied and true," as the Joni Mitchell song had it  It was a view in which they were so highly invested - for whatever personal or ideological reasons - that no amount of reason or evidence would shake it.


Here MercatorNet critiques an article from the New York Times that recognizes at least some of the downside of cohabitation.  Being the NYT, of course, it does not quite go so far as to endorse marriage.

Sliding versus deciding: the risks of cohabitation

Wonders will never cease! The New York Times has published an article pointing out the risks of cohabitation. Here we were, thinking that there was no downside to contemporary coupling when all the time a slippery slope was opening up.
The popular belief that moving in together before marriage is a good way to avoid divorce is simply not borne out by the facts, warns psychologist Meg Jay.

Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages -- and more likely to divorce -- than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect.

Haven’t we all seen it? Dr Jay cites the case of a client, Jennifer, who lived with her boyfriend for four years and then married. Less than a year later she was looking for a divorce lawyer, dreadfully upset and wondering why the marriage didn’t work. It seems she wanted marriage and, after a few years amassing common property, dogs and friends it was too difficult to break up. Besides, they were then in their early 30s.
That story illustrates the “sliding, not deciding” process that commonly leads to cohabitation in the first place: dating, sleeping over at each other’s place, moving in together because it’s cheaper and more convenient -- not because there is a commitment to each other. But set-up and switching costs can be high and it is much more difficult to “slide” out of such a relationship.

Couples bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.

WHEN researchers ask cohabitors these questions, partners often have different, unspoken — even unconscious — agendas. Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage, while men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship or postpone commitment, and this gender asymmetry is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage. One thing men and women do agree on, however, is that their standards for a live-in partner are lower than they are for a spouse.

Note that last sentence. And this:

I’ve had other clients who also wish they hadn’t sunk years of their 20s into relationships that would have lasted only months had they not been living together. Others want to feel committed to their partners, yet they are confused about whether they have consciously chosen their mates. Founding relationships on convenience or ambiguity can interfere with the process of claiming the people we love. A life built on top of “maybe you’ll do” simply may not feel as dedicated as a life built on top of the “we do” of commitment or marriage.

Well said. Unfortunately, Dr Jay does not take the next step and say, “Don’t do it!” Instead, she says she is neither for nor against cohabitation, which, she believes, is “here to stay”. In a piece of advice reminiscent of the “safe sex” mantra which came in with the AIDS era, she suggests that young adults can “protect” their cohabitating relationships from the “cohabitation effect”.

It’s important to discuss each person’s motivation and commitment level beforehand and, even better, to view cohabitation as an intentional step toward, rather than a convenient test for, marriage or partnership.

It also makes sense to anticipate and regularly evaluate constraints that may keep you from leaving.

It’s a pity she could not simply make a plug for marriage, neat. But then, maybe she would not get published in the Times.

Trial Marriage on Trial

Paul Adams | Monday, 2 May 2011

Trial marriage on trial



How many people watched the royal wedding? I have no idea, though I see numbers in the billions (with an ‘s’) – impressive since the entire world population is less than seven billion.

Even though I was up anyway, given the time difference, I could not make it past the first ten minutes. What got to me was none of the usual things – the extravagance, the royal family as symbol and legitimation of class and privilege, etc. And compared to the embarrassing display of mass emotion by the supposedly reserved English surrounding Princess Diana’s funeral, the event was (from what little I saw and the more I have seen since in pictures and reports), stylish and classy.

As one who studies the devastating effect on children, above all poor children, of the collapse of family structure over the three decades since the Charles-Diana wedding, I was depressed and appalled, though not really surprised, by the English announcers’ enthusiastic endorsement of the couple’s life of “shacking up” prior to marriage.

Yes, I know that cohabitation prior to marriage is very common – and I claim no special virtue myself - and that, in any case royals and aristocrats have often behaved no better than they should.

What made this event unique, I suspect, among such royal occasions, was the public endorsement of behaviour that wouldin the past have been passed over in tactful silence – if only because the couple were being married in a church of which the monarch is head and which condemns fornication.

So it is not so much that the behavior was new as that the announcers approved it so warmly. The idea of getting married before you set up house is just so old-fashioned. The living together out of wedlock in a sexual relationship outside marriage – “unthinkable,” an announcer said with a chuckle, in the days of Charles and Diana, just 30 years ago – was now taken for granted. It was, she explained, a good way for the couple to get to know each other and their ways before committing to marriage. So unlike the immature teen Diana and the emotionally challenged Charles, they were entering marriage in a mature way and therefore, the implication was, with a better prospect of success.

The problem is that cohabitation doesn’t work like that. Cohabitation in general lasts an average of two years and is popular precisely because it provides easy access to sex without the legal,moral, and social commitments that marriage entails.

True, not all cohabitation is the same. The most unstable is the kind of serial cohabitation of those for whom cohabitation is an alternative, rather than a prelude to marriage. But the main justification given by the announcer for cohabitation was that it gives the couple a chance to try out the relationship, a kind of unofficial trial marriage. The problem is that it doesn’t work that way. The chances of such an arrangement being followed by a lasting marriage are lower than for a couple who do not live together prior to marriage. The results are closer to all the other alternatives to marriage in their effects on the relationship’s longevity and the outcomes for the children.

Cohabitation after engagement – a kind of live-in engagement – does not have these negative consequences, according to one piece of recent research. But the clear message of the now substantial body of research on cohabitation is that there is no evidence whatever that, in any form, it has any positive effects on subsequent marriage, as the announcers seemed to think. Indeed, the longer a couple cohabits prior to marriage, in general, the shorter the time the marriage will last.

Of course, all such statistics deal in averages and point to risk and protective factors for children and the adults who have them. They do not determine outcomes with any kind of inevitability in individual cases.

What particularly appalled me, though, was the message given to the billions who (apparently) watched, that living together prior to marriage – for years, not weeks, even – is the preferred and mature way to approach marriage.

The one bit, of what I have seen, that I liked was the red L plate prominently affixed to the front of the car in which Prince William drove away his bride. Knowing that this is the sign that learner drivers have to display until they have passed their driving test – and having read that William was a car enthusiast – I was at first puzzled.

I had forgotten that this was an old, if feeble joke that brothers or male friends of the groom played at weddings – the point being that the groom was as yet supposedly inexperienced in his marital duties. A cute touch, but rather flat given the lack of restraint with which the announcers had been discussing the couple’s sex life in their years together prior to marriage. The joke depends on the normative assumption of premarital chastity – however much more honored in the breach than the observance.

Paul Adams is professor of social policy at the Myron B. Thompson School of Social Work at the University of Hawai'i. His blog, Ethics, Culture, and Policy is at http://ethicsculture.blogspot.com.

This article is published by Paul Adams, and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.

Retrieved May 2, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/trial_marriage_on_trial/

The Generation That Can't Move On Up: Marriage, Religion, & Blue Collar Blues

This article by Andrew Cherlin, author of The Marriage Go Round and Bradford Wilcox, author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men and a recent article on "The Evolution of Divorce" in the first issue of National Affairs, Fall 2009, available at http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-evolution-of-divorce, offers a counterpoint to the "very appalling book" by Cahn & Carbone reviewed in the previous post.

Wall Street Journal September 2, 2010

The Generation That Can't Move On Up

By ANDREW J. CHERLIN and W. BRADFORD WILCOX

Most people assume that working-class members of the baby-boomer generation have been hurt the most by the outsourcing and automation in which millions of factory jobs moved overseas or disappeared into computer chips, a shift recently compounded by recession. But actually it may be their children's generation.

Not only are many members of the younger working class unprepared for the contemporary job market. New research we have done shows their striking inability to fit the middle-class ideal in family and religious life. It's a worrisome development for their lifestyle and our culture.

These are the people we used to call "blue collar," although you can no longer tell a person's social class by the color of his shirt. If we can speak of a working class at all, education is now the best way to define them.

Think of people with high school degrees but not four-year college degrees. They make up slightly more than half of all Americans between the ages of 25 and 44; old enough to have completed their schooling but young enough to be still having children, and 79% of them are white. Because they don't have the educational credentials to get most middle-class professional and managerial jobs, their earnings have sunk toward the wages of the working poor.

The grim employment picture is familiar, but what's less widely known is that they are losing not only jobs but also their connections to basic social institutions such as marriage and religion. They're becoming socially disengaged, floating away from the college-educated middle class.

Consider the settings in which they have children. According to surveys by the National Center for Health Statistics, much of the recent rise in childbearing outside of marriage reflects a rise in births to cohabiting couples rather than to women living alone. The percentage of working-class women of all races who were cohabiting when they gave birth rose from 10% in the early 1990s to 27% in the mid-2000s—the largest increase of any educational group.

These working-class couples still value marriage highly. But they don't think they have what it takes to make a marriage work. Across all social classes, in fact, Americans now believe that a couple isn't ready to marry until they can count on a steady income. That's an increasingly high bar for the younger working class. As a result, cohabitation is emerging as the relationship of choice for young adults who have some earnings but not enough steady work to reach the marriage bar.

The problem is that cohabiting relationships don't go the distance. In fact, children who are born to cohabiting parents are more than twice as likely as children born to married parents to see their parents break up by age five. These break-ups are especially troubling because they are often followed by a relationship-go-round, where children are exposed to a bewildering array of parents' partners and stepparents entering and exiting their home in succession.

Church-going habits are changing, too. Traditionally, working-class couples who are married and have steady incomes have attended church, in part, to get reinforcement for the "respectable" lives they lead. But now, when a transformed economy makes marriage and steady work more difficult to attain, those who in better times might have married and attended church appear to be reluctant to show up. Thus, working-class men and women aren't going to religious services as often as they used to.

The drop-off in attendance has been greatest among whites, according to the General Social Survey, conducted biennially by the National Opinion Research Center. In the 1970s, 35% of working-class whites aged 25-45 attended religious services nearly every week, the same percentage as college-educated whites in that age group. Today, the college-educated are the only group who attend services almost as frequently as they did in the 1970s.

Some observers might say that there's nothing alarming about the working class's retreat from marriage and organized religion. It's true that not everyone wishes to marry or to worship, and that family and religious diversity can be valuable.

But the working class is not a cultural vanguard confidently leading the way toward a postmodern lifestyle. Rather, it is a group making constrained choices. For the most part, these are people who would like to marry before having kids but who don't think they are economically ready.

In contrast, college-educated Americans—the winners in our globalized economy—are now living more traditional family and religious lives than their working-class peers. More than 90% of college-educated women are married when they give birth.

What happens, then, when the job-market conditions that once allowed most high-school-educated Americans to connect to the rest of society through hard work, marriage and religious participation no longer exist? Will working-class young adults begin to devalue marriage and religion, or will they fiercely hold onto these ideals because their values are all that they have left?

Will their social disengagement leave them vulnerable to political appeals based on anger and fear? Will their multiple cohabiting unions and marriages prevent their children from developing a sense of attachment to others?

These are the kinds of questions that our nation will confront unless we can narrow the economic and social gap between a middle class that is managing to hold its own in our postindustrial economy and a working class that is falling further and further behind.

Mr. Cherlin is a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

Retrieved September 4, 2010 from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703618504575459994284873112.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion#printMode