{"id":1752,"date":"2010-07-07T09:40:49","date_gmt":"2010-07-07T15:40:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/crawler\/?p=1752"},"modified":"2010-07-07T09:40:49","modified_gmt":"2010-07-07T15:40:49","slug":"complicated-cohabitation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2010\/07\/07\/complicated-cohabitation\/","title":{"rendered":"complicated cohabitation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"more<\/a>The Chicago Tribune<\/a> investigates the complicated relationship between cohabitation, marriage, and divorce:<\/p>\n

The “cohabitation effect,” as it is called, used to be blamed on the notion that those shacking up were unconventional risk-takers who were not as committed to marriage in the first place, while those who waited until marriage to cohabit were more traditional or religious types unlikely to divorce no matter how tough the going got.<\/p>\n

Today, cohabitation is the norm, not some risque arrangement, and while the impact isn’t as pronounced as before, recent studies still show it can negatively affect a marriage. (While not everyone is after a ring, 75 percent of people who cohabit do intend to marry, studies show.)<\/p>\n

According to a March report from the National Center for Health Statistics, which was based on the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, men and women who lived together before they got engaged were less likely to reach their 10th anniversary than those who didn’t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One reason this might be:<\/p>\n

According to Scott Stanley, co-director of the Center for Marriage and Family Studies at the University of Denver, couples who move in together gather “constraints” \u2014 a shared lease, shared pet, shared cell phone plan, emotional attachments \u2014 that make it harder to break up if the relationship goes sour. Inertia can push a cohabiting couple to marry when otherwise they might have broken up…<\/p>\n

Too many couples slide into cohabitation without discussing the implications and expectations for the future, Stanley said. The cash-strapped, the clingy and the more committed partners are especially vulnerable to moving too quickly and then getting sucked into an unhappy marriage, he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sociologists, per usual, complicate the story and note that cohabitation’s contribution to a marriage is not totally clear:<\/p>\n

[S]ome sociologists think there’s merit to the notion of cohabitation serving as a pre-emptive strike to a doomed marriage.<\/p>\n

Cohabitation provides “deep insight into a person you can’t get any other way,” including fidelity and trust issues, said Paula England, professor of sociology at Stanford University.<\/p>\n

Wendy Manning, a sociology professor and co-director of the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University, said situations in which couples live together and then break up might be seen as “premarital divorces.”<\/p>\n

“Would we see more divorces if we didn’t see cohabitation?” Manning said. “I don’t know. It’s complicated, and I don’t think there’s one narrative and one story line. There are many different streams that are going on.” …<\/p>\n

Jay Teachman, a sociology professor at Western Washington University who has studied cohabitation, said age (over 26) and education (a bachelor’s degree) are far more important predictors of marital success than cohabitation, which he believes has no effect on divorce rate \u2014 except for one group.<\/p>\n

Serial cohabiters, those who have had more than one live-in romantic relationship, do have a significantly greater divorce risk, his research has found.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chicago Tribune investigates the complicated relationship between cohabitation, marriage, and divorce: The “cohabitation effect,” as it is called, used to be blamed on the notion that those shacking up were unconventional risk-takers who were not as committed to marriage in the first place, while those who waited until marriage to cohabit were more traditional […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39074],"tags":[39112,122,320,99],"class_list":["post-1752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sightings","tag-culture","tag-lifecourse","tag-marriage","tag-relationships"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1752"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1756,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752\/revisions\/1756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}