Premarital Cohabitation Is Still Associated With Greater Odds of Divorce
by Scott Stanley, Institute for Family Studies:
A new study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family finds that the “premarital cohabitation effect” lives on, despite what you’ve likely heard. The premarital cohabitation effect is the finding that those who live together prior to marriage are more likely, not less, to struggle in marriage. It has a long and storied history in family science.
Michael Rosenfeld and Katharina Roesler’s new findings suggest that there remains an increased risk for divorce for those living together prior to marriage, and that prior studies suggesting the effect has gone away had a bias toward short versus longer-term effects. They find that living together before marriage is associated with lower odds of divorce in the first year of marriage, but increases the odds of divorce in all other years tested, and this finding holds across decades of data.
Numerous Recent Studies Reported No Impact of Premarital Cohabitation
A number of relatively recent studies suggested that the premarital cohabitation effect has gone away among cohorts marrying in the last 10 or 15 years. Rosenfeld and Roesler pay particular attention to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics by Copen, Daniels, Vespa, and Mosher in 2012, which suggested there was no increased risk associated with premarital cohabitation in the most recent (at the time) cohort of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG; 2006 – 2010). Reinhold came to the same conclusion in 2010, and while not cited in the new study, Manning and Cohen reached the same conclusion in 2012, incorporating data from as late as the 2006 to 2008 cohort of the NSFG.1 While all of these studies used the NSFG, Rosenfeld and Roesler had longer-term data for the most recent cohort they study (up to 2015). Contrary to these prior conclusions, they found that there remains a clear link between premarital cohabitation and increased odds of divorce regardless of the year or cohort studied. (In all these studies, the focus is on first marriages.)
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