Will This Marriage Last? - Does Living Together Before Marriage Help the Odds?

From Po:

Today, most couples live together before they marry. We do this for all sorts of mishmashed reasons. You're sleeping in the same bed every night anyway, for instance. Why maintain the cost of two residences? And this living together period is, supposedly, a good way to get the kinks out - sharing closets and bathrooms, learning to communicate when something's bothering you, et cetera. It works like a trial run. If it's not working, you can break up before taking a permanent oath to each other. Many people move in together with no mention or intention of marriage yet; that kind of talk only comes months or years later.

In theory, living together should help the odds, right? It should help prevent some bad marriages from ever occuring - shouldn't it?

Here's the surprising catch: for more than a decade, sociologists have measured that people who have cohabitated before marriage divorce more, not less.

And this wasn't a small difference. In the most famous study, which drew data from a huge number of marriages, people who had cohabited before marriage had only a 49% chance of seeing their 15th wedding anniversary. People who had not cohabited before marriage had a 61% chance of seeing their 15th anniversary. That's a 12% swing! By that measure, it was one of the stronger variables affecting marital stability.

That was back in 2002, and you can imagine how this was seized on by the conservative media: "Living together before marriage leads to divorce!"

Let's call this paradox the Cohabitation Conundrum. If we all assumed living together was beneficial, why were the statistics convincingly showing the opposite?

There was always something fishy about the Cohabitation Conundrum, though. Think of it this way: since the 1970s, cohabitation has been steadily on the rise. Nowadays, most couples do it - almost 80 percent do. And in that time, the divorce rate has actually stabilized, and maybe gone down. It certainly has not gone up.

So what was going on? Well, you might suspect that the authors of that famous 2002 study were religious conservatives who frowned on cohabitating - maybe their study was biased. But let me assure you that is not the case at all. All of the sociologists that Ashley and I quote are even-keeled scholars who only want the truth. We do not invoke biased reports on this blog.

So how to explain it then? Well, in the four years since 2002, sociologists have been slicing and dicing the phenomenon to get a better picture.

Here's some reasons the sociologists had this measured inaccurately for so long:

1. Poor people tend to cohabitate before marriage more than well-off people. (Moving in together does save rent.) And poor people, because they experience more stressors in their lives, tend to divorce more. So the higher divorce rate among cohabitators may have nothing to do with whether they lived together first.
   
   
2. They aggregated all marriages together, going back a couple decades. People who cohabitated back then, when it was less common, had somewhat different results than people who cohabitate today.
   
   
3. They had asked people too broad a question - "did you cohabitate before marriage?" They did not distinguish between people who had cohabitated only with their eventual spouse, and people who had cohabitated with someone else, not their eventual spouse.
   
   
4. When they further cross-analyzed the data by race, they learned that cohabitation increased the odds of divorce for whites, but not for blacks or hispanics.
   
   
5. They didn't have the chance to ask people, "why did you move in together?" This turned out to be very key.

Those distinctions point directly to the conclusions we can make about cohabitation. But probably the top note is that these subfactors did not reverse the cohabitation conundrum, they just made it go away under certain conditions.

In other words, no study has actually found that cohabitating before marriage helps the odds. Only that under certain conditions, it didn't hurt the odds.

It turns out that couples who moved in together with the full-intent of marrying - maybe they were even engaged - do not divorce more than those who never cohabitated.

But couples who moved in together because it was convenient, or because they felt they needed a trial period - those are the ones who tend to get divorced more often. Why didn't this filter work? Well, many couples who "try it out" do break up before marrying, but many of them also just follow the path of inevitability. They had reservations, but they get acclimated to those, and they believe they can live with it. They pretend, "It won't be a problem." Many couples who get divorced will tell you, "The warning signs were there, I just didn't think it would be a problem." So many of these couples "try it out" and ignore the evidence, if you will. They marry anyway, and somewhere down the road they realize "yup, it's a problem." This could be as mild-mannered as a personality conflict, or as major as alcoholism, or somewhere in between - like sexual compatibility.

Here's a curious gender twist that the odds-makers know:

If the bride has cohabitated with another man, (not her eventual spouse), her odds of divorce go up. But if the groom has not cohabitated with another woman - if he's never shacked up with another gal, other than the bride - his odds of divorce go up. Having nothing to compare his marriage to, he might not realize how good he has it. His expectations are probably too high, and he'll get disappointed sooner when the honeymoon wears off.

Lastly, how long the couple lived together before marriage does not appear to be a factor on whether they divorce. Just doesn't.

I recognize the variety of these variables can be hard to apply to one's own life. It doesn't sort out to simple rules, like "Guys should live with another girl first, but girls shouldn't live with a guy unless he's already proposed." Because these are odds, not direct causes. People choose to cohabitate, and then the sociologists measure the outcome. But cohabitation may not be the catalyst. The choice to cohabit may be indicative of underlying relationship chemistry or commitment tenacity - and that might be what really determines who gets divorced.

So what about not getting married? Some couples don't want to ever marry, but they do want to spend the rest of their lives together. Can you cohabit your way "til death do us part"?

Certainly you can, but if you do so, you've really beaten the odds. No sociologist has been able to isolate just those particular couples, so if you're one of those people, I can't say there's a study focussing just on your ilk. But we do know that cohabitating relationships do not last nearly as long as marriages, on average. Again, this could be because of socioeconomic factors - poorer people cohabitate more and marry less, and their lives have many stressors, so their partnerships won't last as long (on average). It's also true that cohabitating couples are less homogamous than married couples. Ashley taught us that term yesterday, and it means "similar." So for all these reasons, we would expect unmarried couples who live together to break up sooner than married couples (on average). Thus, the numbers are no surprise.

If anything, you could argue that the reason the divorce rate has stabilized is not because Dr. Phil is on our television and the bookstores are filled with books on marriage and we have decided, as a society, to never take divorce lightly. The reason the divorce rate might have stabilized is that people in poverty - who are likelier to divorce - are not getting married as much. They're increasingly choosing to live together, rather than marry, and thus their "break ups" don't appear in the divorce statistics.

Not that Dr. Phil and all those books haven't been helpful.

Next up: Does Having Kids Help or Hurt the Odds? And if so, how many kids? And does their gender matter?