Marriage is Better Than Cohabiting

Compared to their married peers, cohabiters consistently have lower rates of well-being than married people. Why? Because cohabiting relationships are ambiguous. Usually each partner has a different understanding of the nature and future of the relationship. In marriage the couple is clear about the claim they have on each other. Husbands are more likely to come home after work and not stay out all night with the guys than boyfriends are. Wives and husbands are not as likely to flirt with others outside the relationship. Marriage helps them know who they belong to emotionally and sexually.

Glenn Stanton, Marriage on Trial: The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting, pg.124-125

Want Marriage? Don't Cohabit

Because men and women differ somewhat in their sexual and mate-selection strategies, cohabitation often has a different meaning for each sex. Women tend to see it as a step toward eventual marriage, while men regard it more as a sexual opportunity without the ties of long-term commitment. A woman’s willingness to cohabit runs the risk of sending men precisely the wrong signal. What our grandmothers supposedly knew might well be true: If a woman truly wants a man to marry her, wisdom dictates a measure of playing hard to get.

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.15

What Culture Has Done

In the past thirty years [from 2002], with the advent of effective contraceptive technologies and widespread sexual permissiveness promoted by advertising and the organized entertainment industry, premarital sex has become widely accepted. In large segments of the population cohabitation no longer is associated with sin or social impropriety or pathology, nor are cohabiting couples subject to much, if any, disapproval. 

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.10

Cohabitation Not Good For Children

One of the greatest problems for children living with a cohabiting couple is the high risk that the couple will break up. Fully three quarters of children born to cohabiting parents will see their parents split up before they reach age sixteen, whereas only about a third of children born to married parents face a similar fate. ...

Parental break up, as is now widely known, almost always entails a myriad of personal and social difficulties for children, some of which can be long lasting. For the children of a cohabiting couple these may come on top of a plethora of already existing problems. Several studies have found that children currently living with a mother and her unmarried partner have significantly more behavior problems and lower academic performance than children in intact families.

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.8

Dangers of Cohabitation

Annual rates of depression among cohabiting couples are more than three times what they are among married couples. And women in cohabiting relationships are more likely than married women to suffer physical and sexual abuse. Some research has shown that aggression is at least twice as common among cohabitors as it is among married partners. Two studies, one in Canada and the other in the United States, found that women in cohabiting relationships are about nine times more likely to be killed by their partner than are women in marital relationships.

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.7

Cohabitation Is Mentally Harmful

Cohabiting couples report lower levels of happiness, lower levels of sexual exclusivity and sexual satisfaction, and poorer relationships with their parents. One reason is that, as several sociologists not surprisingly concluded after a careful analysis, in unmarried cohabitation “levels of certainty about the relationship are lower than in marriage.” 

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.6

The Effects of Cohabitation

The act of cohabitation generates changes in people’s attitudes toward marriage that make the stability of marriage less likely. Society wide, therefore, the growth of cohabitation will tend to further weaken marriage as an institution. An important caveat must be inserted here. There is a growing understanding among researchers that different types and life-patterns of cohabitation must be distinguished clearly from each other. Cohabitation that is an immediate prelude to marriage, or prenuptial cohabitation—both partners plan to marry each other in the near future—is different from other forms. There is some evidence to support the proposition that living together for a short period of time with the person one intends to marry has no adverse effects on the subsequent marriage. Cohabitation in this case appears to be very similar to marriage; it merely takes place during the engagement period. This proposition would appear to be less true, however, when one or both of the partners has had prior experience with cohabitation, or brings children into the relationship.

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.6

Cohabitation Makes Marriage Less Successful

The results of several studies suggest that cohabitation may change partners’ attitudes toward the institution of marriage, contributing to either making marriage less likely, or if marriage takes place, less successful. A 1997 longitudinal study conducted by demographers at Pennsylvania State University concluded, for example, “cohabitation increased young people’s acceptance of divorce, but other independent living experiences did not.” And “the more months of exposure to cohabitation that young people experienced, the less enthusiastic they were toward marriage and childbearing.”

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.5

Cohabitation Gives No Contribution to Marriage

No positive contribution of cohabitation to marriage has ever been found. The reasons for a negative “cohabitation effect” are not fully understood. One may be that while marriages are held together largely by a strong ethic of commitment, cohabiting relationships by their very nature tend to undercut this ethic. Although cohabiting relationships are like marriages in many ways--shared dwelling, economic union (at least in part), sexual intimacy, often even children--they typically differ in the levels of commitment and autonomy involved. According to recent studies, cohabitants tend not to be as committed as married couples in their dedication to the continuation of the relationship and reluctance to terminate it, and they are more oriented toward their own personal autonomy.

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.5

Spousal Benefits Should Be Reserved for REAL Marriage

The continued extension of spousal benefits to domestic partners further erodes the status and practice of marriage, ultimately reducing the well-being of children, increasing taxpayer costs, and retarding workforce productivity and economic progress. Domestic partnership benefits do not fulfill a large, unmet social need, but instead operate primarily on the symbolic level, as a signal that these relationships are marriage equivalents. …

Given the powerful advantages of marriage in protecting the well-being of children and the productivity of adults, responsible executives should be reluctant to embrace policies that suggest or imply to workers, their lovers, or their children that cohabitation is the functional equivalent of marriage, or that children do not really need both mothers and fathers.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Cohabitation Is Not Like Marriage

Living together is not just like marriage because marriage is not just a piece of paper. Marriage is a powerful social institution that changes the way adults behave towards each other and their children.  But institutions have this power only when their boundaries are protected. If society begins to treat other relationships as the equivalent of marriage, marriage loses some of it social power, especially the power to signal to young people and prospective parents that this particular kind of relationship—a lifelong legal and public commitment joining mothers and fathers in one family unit—is the most socially responsible and desirable context for having children.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Only REAL Marriage Benefits Society

Studies show that marriage plays a powerful role in adult well-being; married people live longer and healthier lives, and exhibit fewer signs of mental illness. Marriage is also a productive economic relationship, a powerful generator of human and social capital. Married people earn more money than otherwise similar single individuals, and build more wealth than singles with similar incomes. Married workers (especially married men) are more productive and motivated, on average, than otherwise similar single employees. Married people experience less economic hardship than singles with similar incomes.

The failure to marry taxes society as a whole. Children whose parents do not get married or do not stay married, for example, are more likely to drop out of high school, commit crimes and display other conduct disorders, experience more infant mortality, childhood illnesses and disease, and suffer from mental illness. As adults, they achieve less academically and occupy lower-status jobs, on average, than children whose parents were able to forge a good-enough marriage bond, even after accounting for race and family background.

There is no scientific evidence to support the recent idea that domestic partnerships are the functional equivalent of marriage. Adults who merely live together more closely resemble singles than married people. Children who live with cohabiting parents do no better than children of solo moms.

Giving cohabiters the same benefits in law and policy as married couples does not therefore represent justice or fairness. By offering the social rewards of marriage but without its public responsibilities, domestic partnership benefits discourage marriage. Why marry the mother of your new baby if the society says living together is just as good--and may even increase the government subsidies available to your family?

Likewise, a same-sex domestic partner [or “marriage”] benefits send a confusing signal, giving the appearance of providing an appropriate context for having and raising children, when the social science evidence supports the idea that children benefit from having both a mother and a father.

Confining benefits to spouses is one way that the law, pubic policy and society point out to the next generation the unique importance of marriage. Extending marital benefits to other intimate couplings sends a message that is dangerously untrue. Living together and being married are just not the same, for children or their parents.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Lives of Married Couples vs Cohabiting Couples

Married couples have the possibility of maturing and evolving, but cohabitating couples typically succumb to relational inertia. Without the foundation of marriage vows and shared selflessness, they cannot build anything stable. They live “day to day,” and have to shut out the possibility of planning for the future because that future may not exist, and, theoretically, they should have everything they want already. …

People who cohabitate believe they will have the best of both the single and married life. They believe that they will have the freedom of single people, paying their own way, leading their own life, and having the option to leave, while enjoying the stability of married people, having steady company each night. In reality, they usually have the opposite: they are not free, and it is not stable. This is because people who have decided to live together cannot simply break up as though they were only dating. Cohabitation is commitment without commitment, and people invest a great deal of themselves (their time, their emotions, and their money) into a relationship when moving in together—even if they say and imagine otherwise. After a few months, or a few years, it is far easier to keep things intact than breaking up a bad relationship, so nothing changes.

Moreover, people who cohabitate for so long have increasingly fewer options available to them once they break up. Instead of dating and meeting different people in their 20s, they loafed around with a subpar mate and let the best years of their life pass them by. Once they seriously look for a spouse in their 30s, they will have to tote around some heavy personal baggage.

Auguste Meyrat, How Cohabitation Traps People Into Using Each Other

Do Not Base Romantic Relationships on Practicality

Forming or maintaining a relationship on the basis of practicality may serve well with classmates and coworkers, but this will not do for romantic relationships, which actually do require romance. Once practicality takes root as the couple’s primary concern, short-term material goods (money, chores, schedule, sex) supersede long-term immaterial goods (virtue, understanding, life goals, general happiness). In the practical arrangement of cohabitation, two people will mutually seek to maximize their own interests through each other. This may have the appearance of marriage, but it is only a parody: the love and generosity one would expect devolves into lust and greed.

By turning people in on themselves and their own interests, the focus on practicality essentially objectifies both parties in the relationship. Consider the analogy some give for cohabitation: just as one would test-drive a car before buying it, one should live (and sleep) with another person before deciding to marry. What, exactly, are people imagining when they think this? Do they really think they can test-drive a person by living with him or her for however many months or years? Only if they view other people as objects to be used and marriage as a material investment that will likely lose value over time.

Auguste Meyrat, How Cohabitation Traps People Into Using Each Other

Cohabitation is More Stressful Than Marriage

According to multiple studies, cohabitation is considered more stressful than getting married.  Only about half of those who start out living together outside of wedlock EVER get married.  Those who do, are at a substantially higher risk for divorce than those who don’t live together before marriage — most divorcing within just seven years.  Co-habiting couples are also more likely to experience infidelity in their relationship, and the QUALITY of their relationship is of a poorer quality: more fighting, more violence, and less overall happiness.  Studies also show co-habiting couples have higher levels of depression and substance abuse, and also earn less money.

Rob Pue, The Weed of Porn Bears Bitter Fruit

Men Looking For Sex are Not Looking for Marriage

A man who is looking for recreational premarital sex with a woman before marriage is not looking for marriage, but recreation. Marriage is a commitment to work hard, be disciplined, be self-sacrificial and to compromise with another person – all in close quarters. When choosing a mate, you need to look for someone who is good at commitments. Not someone who is good at fun. The ability to have fun with a man is not a good predictor of marital success because fun is unrelated to the things that a man really does in a marriage: protect, provide, and lead on moral and spiritual issues.

Wintery Knight, “New Study: Men and Women Have Different Goals and Expectations When Cohabiting.”

Family Is Still the Building Block of Society

The methodical, deliberate redefinitions of terms such as life, gender, marriage, identity, etc. and the replacement of critical institutions, like the family and the faith community, with the government, have created the new normal. Many citizens now look to government programs to fulfill needs and solve problems, releasing them from a sense of personal responsibility or ownership and lessening dependence upon family.

Today, one’s identity is warped into a social construct permitted by some conjured up “right” to reject biology. Marriage, similarly, has been redefined to make a political point instead of its purpose as a key in a healthy society to procreate and provide sustenance and support. These reckless maneuvers borne on the political Left aimed to establish a more “progressive” society are, in fact, resulting in its destruction and material harm to individuals. …

The Left demands “educational equity” in schools but won’t dare touch the facts that children do better when parents are their first teachers, and a home is comprised of a mom and a dad. The “liberated” women of the Left, now even more angry and militant than ever, seem to thrive in the newly defined male persona of either an effeminate and compliant being or excessive in masculinity that translates into violent, oppressive, and sexist behavior. As noted in the June 2014 edition of the Institute for Family Studies, these women, united in their grievances, completely disregard social science that demonstrates “daughters whose fathers have been actively engaged throughout childhood in promoting their academic or athletic achievements and encouraging their self-reliance and assertiveness are more likely to graduate from college and to enter the higher-paying, more demanding jobs traditionally held by males.”

Robin Smith, The Family Is Still the Building Block of Society.

The TRUTH About Sex and Honor

In our sexual revolution we have forgotten and ignored the truth that sex without love and commitment equals loneliness. It is often empty and degrading. In addition we have lost the innocence we had when we more clearly understood that sex was a beautiful gift from God and that he ordained our sexual instincts to be completed in marriage.  We have lost the sense of wonder and beauty found in our God-given ability to express our sexuality in the sanctity of marriage—as the means of constantly renewing our love for and devotion to one another. But perhaps most tragically, we have lost our honor. Remember the scene from Gone With the Wind when Scarlett was pleading with Ashley to leave his wife and baby and run away with her? At one point she cried, “Oh, Ashley! Don’t you see? There’s nothing to keep us here!” To which Ashley replied, “Nothing? . . . Nothing except our honor.”

What has become of our honor as persons and as a nation? Something inside us dies when we lose our honor, when we give in to the standards that go against everything we know within our hearts to be right. Our consciences have been deadened through our sexual revolution, and our moral values have been served into numbness. Our spiritual landmarks are missing and we no longer have any moorings to cling to. We are held captive in a dark prison of liberation.

Hope MacDonald, The Flip Side of Liberation: A Call to Traditional Values, pg.133

Cohabitation Before Marriage is NOT Good

It’s not enough to say that cohabitation is different from marriage. The truth is that it’s the direct opposite of marriage. In marriage, you live as one united through sickness and health until death do you part. In cohabitation, you live as two divided, for an undetermined period of time, for as long as it remains convenient until one or both of you decides otherwise. You may point out that many modern marriages function more like the latter than the former, and I’d agree. That’s the point. Cohabitation doesn’t resemble marriage, but, in our culture, marriage increasingly resembles cohabitation.

Matt Walsh, “5 reasons why living together before marriage will kill your relationship”

An Incompetent Culture

Unmarried men who shack up with women tend to be irresponsible, unproductive, and aggressive; unmarried women who shack up with men tend to be selfish and prodigal and want Big Daddy the government to take the same care of them that fathers and husbands used to take.  But those who do marry no longer seem to know what it is that they are doing.  Is it for keeps, or not?  What happens when children start arriving?  What’s a husband supposed to do?  What’s a wife supposed to do?

We are incompetent in the ordinary things of life.  We divorce more readily than we sell houses, yet for some reason we believe that we possess great wisdom as regards men and women that our benighted ancestors did not possess.  We raise sons who are not weaned at age twenty-five, yet for some reason we have contempt for the old institutions that used to turn boys into men.  We raise daughters who emulate well-paid whores, but who do not actually make the money that the whores make, and yet we persist in believing that only in our time has a girl had half a chance to live a decent life.  We are in debt over the eyeballs, we cannot make ends meet even on two incomes, and yet we hug ourselves for being “liberated,” looking with pity on a grandmother who in a single day did fifty skillful things for people she loved, rather than spending eight hours fielding telephone calls in an office or scraping plaque off the teeth of strangers, while wearing goggles and a face mask to guard against dreadful infections from their blood and spittle.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.9-10