As Cohabitation Gains Favor, Shotgun Weddings Fade

[Purveyor]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- No longer taboo, living together has become a more common arrangement for America's couples who become pregnant while dating.

Soon-to-be-released government figures show a major cultural shift since the days of "shotgun weddings" aimed at avoiding family embarrassment. With marriage on the decline, the shift is helping redefine the traditional notion of family.

"The emergence of cohabitation as an acceptable context for childbearing has changed the family-formation landscape," said Christina Gibson-Davis, a sociology professor at Duke University. "Individuals still value the idea of a two-parent family but no longer consider it necessary for the parents to be married."

Still, she cautions that children in cohabiting households may face more difficulties growing up if their unmarried parents are at higher risk of breaking up.

In all, the share of unmarried couples who opted to have "shotgun cohabitations" - moving in together after a pregnancy - surpassed "shotgun marriages" for the first time over the last decade, according to a forthcoming paper from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The trend was affirmed by three demographers who conducted separate research on the topic.


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http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SHOTGUN_COHABITATION?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-01-06-22-38-17

[ProgressSaves]

1. This has been one trend that has been nice to see.

Many lives have been ruined over the need to tie yourself to someone else forever.

[Mass]

2. Excellent. Time for the US to join the rest of the civilized world.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

3. A marriage certificate is not a magic piece of paper.

Fundamentalists fetishize a piece of paper. A marriage certificate will not make a spouse love you, like you, respect you, or treat you properly.
If you think God will smite you dead if you have sex without that state-issued screwing license, then you have some other problems.

There is one particular judgmental bastard that makes money preaching to church singles groups that God gets mad if you don't have that magic piece of paper sanctioning your sexual activity. That just makes single people feel guilty when they should sort out their own morality instead of looking to some guy making money off telling people to feel guilty about their sexual desires.

A marriage certificate won't make your spouse love you, like you, respect you or treat you decently. I learned this the hard way. I don't think either of my first two husbands had any intention of honoring their marriage vows, so there was nothing to do but get a divorce.

I had a couple of people tell me that if my husband wasn't drinking or doing drugs or cheating on me or beating me up, that my marriage was OK. This was in regards to the second one. That was not true. According to him, everything was my fault, and I did everything I did just to tick him off. That's how narcissistic he was. I guess he thought the sun and moon revolved around him too.