Living Together First Doesn’t Make Marriage Last, Study Finds

[alp227]

Couples who live together before they get married are less likely to stay married, a new study has found. But their chances improve if they were already engaged when they began living together.

The likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first, the study found.

The study of men and women ages 15 to 44 was done by the National Center for Health Statistics using data from the National Survey of Family Growth conducted in 2002. The authors define cohabitation as people who live with a sexual partner of the opposite sex.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/us/03marry.html

[skipos]

1. That is surprising. It is also surprising that some studies find arrange marriages to be as happy

& unhappy as traditional ones.

[frazzled]

2. After 36 years of marriage ...

I guess the Frazzled Family is the exception to the rule. We lived together for several years before we were married, and I'd recommend it to any young couple. How the hell else are you going to know if the person putting the toilet paper roll on backwards or failing to put the toothpaste cap back on the tube is going to drive you crazy or not?

[calimary]

12. So's the calimary family. We lived together off-and-on for about a year before we got married.

This April, we'll hit Year 34.

And yeah, if our either daughter or our son wanted to do it that way, I wouldn't discourage either one of them from it.

[liberal_at_heart]

13. We're an exception to the rule too

My husband and I lived together before we were married and and we've been married for 15 years.

[seabeyond]

29. you arent the exception to rule, odds just go down a tad. nt

[DesertFlower]

3. i lived with hubby a year before

we got married. we've been together 39 years.

on the other hand, both of my sisters are on their 3rd husbands. they both lived with the first 2 before they were married.

[Barack_America]

4. Well, duh. People who find cohabitation acceptable are more likely to find divorce acceptable.

and vice versa.

The problem is that these studies always use divorce as a measure for marriage success rather than satisfaction or happiness. There are lots of failed marriages out there that will never end in divorce due to social or religious stigmata.

[Sal Minella]

7. True.

My parents stayed married for fifty years, but fifty years of two people making each other completely miserable is not "success" by any rational standard I can think of.

[SallyMander]

11. I was just about to post this

This stat is totally confounded by an "invisible covariate" -- "traditionalism" for lack of a better word.

[Barack_America]

28. Stat speak.

Nice! ;)

[Skittles]

17. most of the married people I know just seem to put up with each other

[liberal_at_heart]

18. While it is true that some marriages are unhappy that doesn't mean the majority are

I'm sorry if that has been your experience with married couples. My husband and I are best friends. Yes, part of a long marriage is being able to tolerate one another. I read a great article a couple of weeks ago that said that a long marriage will experience daily compassion and forgiveness because guess what? You will get on each other's nerves. You will get busy or even bored. You may even say some hurtful things. But if you forgive each other and wake up every day trying to figure out what you are going to do to improve your relationship instead of just blaming your spouse then you make your way back to each other. There is no human on Earth family, friends or otherwise that you will get along with 100% of the time. I would have to say that one of the most important things that has helped me and my husband is just being good friends to each other and being a safe place to fall when the rest of the world is cruel. When you have similar goals, when you can face the world together then you work as a team. That's not to say you can't have differences. My husband and I are very different people and allow each other to grow and pursue our individual interests but we are always a team.

[Skittles]

23. and....you have to be married to experience that?

[Berry Cool]

19. What--people don't get divorced because they have holes in their hands and feet?

I guess it would be hard to find a new spouse with wounds like that. Kinda unattractive.

[Barack_America]

21. Um yeah, something like that.

Or something more like the Scarlet Letter.

:shrug:

[REP]

26. Stigma, not stigmata

Stigmata is manifestation of the wounds of the Crucifixion. Stigma is a mark of shame.

[Barack_America]

27. It's plural.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stigmata

Perhaps I should have used "stigmas". Curious that there are two plural forms of the same word.

Meh. Whatever.

[Echo In Light]

5. We've beaten the odds: began dating in 88, moved in together 93, married in 96

[petersjo02]

6. We lived together for five years

and then got married in 1991. So far we still like each other.

[Feron]

8. Not surprising.

Some cohabiting couples may think that marriage is the next step when neither or only one party is ready.

[Sisaruus]

9. Married twice, divorced twice. I recommend living together before marriage.

With my second husband, we lived together for 8 years. Married for 16 years. Divorced now for 4 years but still good friends.
It was a second marriage for both of us.
Neither of us lived together first with our first spouses. In my case, the second marriage was twice as long as the first marriage. In his case, the second marriage was the same length as the first marriage.

Having married both ways (cohabitating first and not), I recommend living together before saying "I do."
Having been divorced twice, I highly recommend being single.

[arbusto_baboso]

10. If half of all marriages end in divorce, you aren't gonna get rosier stats...

just from those who live together before marrying.

Anyone with a brain could tell you that.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

14. Not my experience.

Living together does not mean you will have a sucessful marriage, but it does mean that you will have some idea what the other person is like. Some people are on their good behavior until they get married and then start raising hell with the other person, and become intolerable.

I would never marry someone without living together first.

[Solly Mack]

15. New? I recall the same thing being said for years...

http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-02-01/living/17188509_1_cohabitation-marriage-divorce-rates

"Conventional wisdom - backed up by studies in the 1980s and '90s - has held that so-called serial cohabitants have higher divorce rates than those who wait until marriage to live together."

[Missy Vixen]

16. We lived together for seven months before we got married

We've been married for sixteen years.

I would never consider marrying someone I didn't live with first. Ever.

[RainDog]

20. the two people who are married make marriage last

personally, I would never marry someone if we hadn't made love before we were married, at the very least. If you're going to spend your life with someone, you want it to be someone who is sexually compatible.. or at least I would.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

22. And if one person does not take the marriage seriously, it will never work.

I was committed, but I was married to two men who would not take their vows seriously.
The first one was in college, smoked dope, drank wine, and screwed a mere SEVEN of my girlfriends. He couldn't understand why I was so pissed at him. There was no way he was going to be responsible and keep it in his pants.

The second one, I thought he was a good guy. He never told me he loved me, never gave me any emotional support, never gave me even a five dollar gift for my birthday, valentine's day or christmas. Then he started refusing to bathe and making himself repulsive in order to punish me by withdrawing sex. According to him, everything was my fault.

He nagged me so much that eventually I filed for divorce, which made me look like the bad guy. He had it all planned ahead of time. He was deposed and could not explain the magical appearance in his bank account of a cancelled check for a deposit on an apartment, a couple of months before I filed for divorce. It magically wrote itself, and magically signed his name, and magically went to the apartments, and was paid and resturned to his account, all by magic.

Neither of these marriages had any possible solution other than divorce. You can't change a person who is not taking their marriage vows seriously.

A piece of paper will not make someone like you or love you. These right wingers who think poor people should get married, and then all their problems will disappear, have the wrong attitude.

[ChoppinBroccoli]

24. We Lived Together For A Year Before We Got Married

And not only did I find it to be a very positive experience that has HELPED our marriage, but I would recommend it to MY OWN CHILDREN. If you're thinking about getting married.......DEFINITELY.......live together first. Don't buy a car without test-driving it first. This isn't the frickin' 1950s anymore (as much as the Republicans would like it to be). Unmarried couples living together doesn't carry the stigma it once did. That was provincial, Puritanical thinking. Time to cast it off. Just like the whole "no sex before marriage" thing. Not only is it outdated, but it's STUPID!!! Why would you walk into something this big totally blind? The way I look at it, the first year of marriage is hard enough without having to get used to another person's little everyday quirks. If you live together first, you already know those quirks and they're not a surprise to you once you're married.

As I said, Mrs. Choppin and I have been married going on 7 years now, and we're as blissfully happy today as we were the day we got married. And I think at least a SMALL part of our success can be attributed to living together first. Of course, we were engaged when we moved in together, so maybe that kicks us into that other group, but still, the advice is sound. I'd advise anyone who asks that if you're thinking of getting married, live together for a minimum of a year first. It will either confirm that you're right for each other or head off disaster before it's legally binding.

[Unvanguard]

25. That proves nothing causal. n/t