Cohabitation

I have become increasingly aware of the growing problem of cohabitation between unmarried young men and women lately. The Census Bureau reports that cohabitation has become the fastest growing family configuration over the past two decades, increasing at an astonishing rate of 700% since 1970.

The “sexual revolution,” brought on by the invention of the birth control pill, has uncoupled the triad of sex, marriage, and babies that has held the family together for thousands of years. Now, young people do not see the point of getting married in order to have sex. They see living together as a viable alternative to the way things were before. They see marriage as an encumbrance to their desired style of living—this attitude is especially prevalent in young men, who shy away from taking the responsibility of caring for a wife and child. Both men and women seek self-expression and fulfillment; and they see marriage and family as a roadblock to attaining those goals.

 Young adults have devised two different ways of rationalizing the use of cohabitation in their lives: They see a high road and a low road to justify breaking away from the old ways of the Bible and classical family structure.

The high road says, “Marriage is such an important thing in life that I do not want to make any mistakes by marrying the wrong person. So…I will make sure of our compatibility by living together for a time; if we prove to be compatible, we will certainly get married. If we do not like one another after living together, then we will just split; and nobody will be hurt by all the well-known pain of a divorce. It’s just as simple as that!”

People on the low road of rationalism say, “There is nothing about a piece of paper that should obligate us to stay together. If we love one another, then we will live together in just the same way as if we had been married in front of a church altar. Cohabitation will allow the warmth of love, not cold legalities to regulate our relationship to one another.”

There is a myth afoot that cohabitation before marriage decreases the divorce rate. Studies in Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United States show that those who cohabit before marriage have substantially higher divorce rates than those who do not. In fact, the recorded differences range from 50-100% higher. Sociologists have found that cohabitation is associated with greater marital conflict and poorer communication. Their studies showed that the longer the premarital cohabitation, the more likely will divorce follow marriage. Studies at the University of Nebraska in a nationally representative sample found that “cohabitation is not related to marital happiness, but it is related to lower levels of marital interaction, higher levels of marital disagreement and marital instability.” In other words, cohabiters tend to fight a lot and do not frequently have a lasting relationship with one another.  A joint study conducted by three Canadian universities found that of all couples married less than ten years, 31% of those who cohabited before marriage divorced, compared to a divorce rate of 14% for those who did not cohabit before marriage. It has been observed that those who cohabited before marriage and later divorce are more likely to move back into a cohabitational situation after their marriage dissolves—nearly extinguishing their chances for a more successful subsequent relationship.

Many young women think that if they have sex with a boyfriend, he will marry them in the near future. Sadly, this is usually not true. Young men who can get sex from a woman without assuming the responsibility of marriage very often will not marry her.

Cohabitation flies in the face of biblical admonitions. Nothing is more clear in the Bible than the fact that having sex with a person to whom one is not married is adultery and punishable by loss of one’s eternal life in Christ. (Rev 21:8; Heb 13:4)