Living together: good idea or not?
by Mira and Charles on March 8th, 2010Shacking up before marriage does NOT cause divorce
OK, so here’s how it goes. The
Then a reporter for the New York Times reads this study and writes a story about it in which he screws up and gets the emphasis all bass ackwards. He thinks the lead is, “Couples who live together before they get married are less likely to stay married, a new study has found,” as if that’s the most important nugget in the data.
Well, it isn’t. Unless you’re a parent trying to prevent your daughter from living with that no good bum without a ring on her finger.
So what’s wrong with this reporting?
The reporter has no sense of what’s most important. And his conclusion is not even really true. Here are two huge examples.
OK, so cohabiting doesn’t work the way we thought it might, based on the raw data. You know: you live with someone and if it shows, uh-oh, maybe you don’t do so well living under the same roof then you don’t get married. Which weeds out potential bad marriages. That’s the idea. And now we’re told this is not true. At least if you look at the gross statistics.
But if you look below the surface, a different picture emerges. For one thing, a lot of the stats that predict that people will live together also predict that their marriages will not last. For example, women who were not living with both parents at age fourteen were more likely to be cohabiting and less likely to be married than women with grew up in intact homes. But women who did not grow up in intact homes were also more likely to get divorced whether or not they cohabited before marriage.
In other words, cohabiting before marriage doesn’t make it less likely that a subsequent marriage will fail. Cohabiting is itself caused by a number of factors that make divorce more likely.
You see, there is a confusion between cohabitation as a decision and as a state. As a decision, it is likely to be influenced by factors that predict divorce. As a state in and of itself, it may very well be a protection against divorce. Take two couples with the same factors present—age, race, income, etc. The cohabiting couple may be likely to be married longer if they do marry.
Think of it like this: more people die who are in hospital than who aren’t. So that makes it look as though hospitals were dangerous places. But let’s remember that it’s the things that bring people to hospitals that make their death more likely, not their being in the hospital itself.
Plus—and boy all this thinking is exhausting—a focus on cohabiting leaves out far more important predictors of divorce, like being young or being from a different background from your future spouse.
Bottom line: two people, about thirty years old, well matched to each other, of similar backgrounds, who’ve taken the time to get to know each other well will have a way above average chance of never getting divorced. Whether or not they live together first makes little difference but probably help a little. That’s the bottom line.
Now here’s the other example of a reality that should have made the headline. Forget cohabiting. Race is the really big issue. Check this out. 63 percent of white women, 39 percent of black women and 58 percent of Hispanic women have ever been married. Let this sink in. Black women are almost half as likely to get married as white women. Forget the piddling cohabitation effect. Want to get married and stay married? Don’t be black. That’s what the data show. Don’t shoot me: I’m just the messenger.
And this is a national tragedy. That’s your headline. Marriage is associated with all kinds of good things: more wealth, healthier children, better educated children, lower drug use among one’s children, lower rates of incarceration. You name it. And black women are denied (or deny themselves) this good thing. If that’s not a form of oppression, I don’t know what is.
One other thing that wasn’t mentioned in the article. For any given race, age, socio-economic status, the factors most responsible for finding someone you can be happily married to for a long time are in our book Is He Mr. Right?: Everything You Need to Know Before You Commit. It’s all about your chemistry, and this is the first and only book to show just how to determine if you really have the right chemistry for a long and happy relationship. Check it out, please. Use your head to save your heart.
