The San Francisco Chronicle reported today on new research from sociologist Daniel Lichter of Cornell University about the impact of living together before marriage. The Chronicle reports:
Spurred by the sexual revolution and buoyed by recent economic concerns and marital trends, cohabitation – as a temporary situation, a lengthy arrangement or something in between – has become a unique, multifaceted institution in its own right, and a hot field of study among sociologists.
It’s not without controversy. 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. However, new data suggest that when someone cohabits only with a future spouse, divorce rates are the same or lower than if they didn’t live together before marriage.
But new research from a number of sociologists suggests its time to revise our views on the effects of living together:
A study published in November by sociologist Daniel Lichter of Cornell University found that the odds of divorce among women who married their sole cohabiting partner were 28 percent lower than those of women who never cohabited. (See “Behind the numbers” story on D3.)
“They used to say that cohabitation was a risk factor for divorce. Now that we have broader samples, that’s not true,” says Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and author of “Marriage, a History.”
The majority of Americans now live together before getting married. Of couples married after 1995, 65 percent of men and women in first-time marriages lived together beforehand, according to the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth.
“For most people, cohabitation is still a transition point,” says University of Michigan sociologist Pamela Smock. “This is not the case for everyone, as there is an increase in the percentage of cohabiters who live together for a long period of time – a subgroup for whom it’s not just a train stop. But by and large, cohabiting relationships tend to be short, as the couple either breaks up or marries within a number of years.”
She expects that in coming years, as much as 80 percent of the population will live together unmarried at some point in their lives, up from the current 70 percent.
One can’t talk about cohabitation without also talking about marriage. As the average age of a first marriage in the United States has risen to 27 years for men and 25 for women, young adults are filling in before that with “marriage lite,” in Coontz’s words.
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