Living together before getting married: Should you buy before you try?
by Harry Benson, The Marriage Foundation:
It sounds like common sense. Live with somebody for a while and you’ll find out properly if you’re a good match for a life together. Wouldn’t you want to know in advance about that frightful habit you really can’t stand? By living together, you make sure they are the one … and also avoid making a huge mistake!
This is of course quite different to how previous generations thought, brought up to believe that you got married before moving in. But that’s definitely the way many people think today.
And it’s a view that has a growing body of research behind it.
Several studies now suggest that living together before getting married no longer has any effect on your chances of divorce. A 2014 article in Time magazine reports on one prominent study in the Journal of Marriage and Family that found most of the reason why couples do better or worse if they live together first is down to the age at which they move in together, and not whether they cohabit first or marry first.
So imagine the surprise when, four years later, along comes a new study in the same journal that suggests exactly the opposite.
Were previous generations right after all? Apart from the very first year of marriage when the risk is lower, couples who live together first do consistently worse once married compared to those who didn’t live together. Just like the other one, this study takes into account age at marriage, education, ethnicity, length of marriage, the presence of children, and family history.
There’s a healthy – and remarkably polite – debate taking place in academics blogs that argue either why cohabiting prior to marriage continues to raise risks or why it actually lowers them!
Who is right?
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