Does Living Together First Make Marriage Last?

by Sarah Treleaven Mar 4th 2010 2:00PM

Categories: Sex, Love & Relationships, Happiness

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Does Living Together First Make Marriage Last?">

For many people, living with a partner before considering marriage just makes sense - it's a test run to determine whether you can really live together peaceably, or whether you'll actually send each other screaming in opposite directions. It might come as a big shock that he refuses to do the dishes or that she sometimes watches 12 straight hours of television. You can learn a lot about people when you're dating, but when you have separate apartments you can still retreat to your own space to engage in whatever weird behaviour you want. This week, Sam Roberts at The New York Times looks at a study that explored whether couples who live together before they get married are more likely to stay married.

And what's the verdict?

Well, the title of the story says it all: Study Finds Cohabiting Doesn't Make a Union Last. A new study done by the National Center for Health Statistics in the United States has found that couples who live together before getting married are less likely to stay married - but their chances improve somewhat if they get engaged before they move in together, or if they marry at an older age or have a baby eight or more months after marrying. (And, as with most marriage statistics, their odds for success also increase if they're both college graduates.) The odds that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percent if the couple lived together prior to marriage. Half of couples who cohabit marry within three years, and the study also found that more and more women have lived with a partner by their late thirties, doubling in the last 15 years to 61 percent.

The study also determined some general marriage statistics:
  • 62 percent of American women, ages 25 to 44, were married and only eight percent were cohabiting; the comparable figures for men were 59 percent and 10 percent.
  • One in five marriages will dissolve within five years, and one in three will last less than 10 years. For women, the odds are 50-50 that their marriage will last more than 20 years.
  • Interestingly, about 23 percent of women married without first living with their partner, bucking a more modern trend.
The idea that living together before marriage actually makes your marriage less likely to succeed might seem counter intuitive, but the study doesn't talk about groups of people who are more likely to stay in unhappy marriages and less likely to divorce - and those are often people who would not consent to cohabitation before marriage whether influenced by religious beliefs or more traditional ideas about marriage. Perhaps people who are willing to live with a partner before getting a ring on their finger are also more likely to break a union if their needs aren't being met.

So do you think that living together before marriage is a good idea?

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