A trio of studies in the May Journal of Marriage and Family may be leading indicators of a fundamental shift in how cohabitation impacts eventual marriage. It may not be as harmful as previously thought.
It has been well-established for years that cohabitation before marriage increases eventual chances of divorce. (A good-albeit-old summary of this research, including possible explanations, is here.) This has been such a clear and consistent finding, in fact, that its opposite is featured in my 2008 article as a “myth about marriage” that research has convincingly debunked.
Now, all that may be changing. A study of marriages in Australia finds that the gap between cohabiting couples and non-cohabitors in later risk of divorce has been shrinking as cohabitation has become more common. The correlation may even have flipped. In one of the study’s predictive models, for couples married since about 1987, non-cohabitors have been more likely to eventually separate than those who cohabited prior to marriage. (In the study’s other predictive model, the lines have not yet crossed, but since the late 1990s there has been essentially no difference between cohabitors and non-cohabitors in risk of separation.)
There’s more. A separate national (US) study examining marital quality rather than simply separation looked at nearly 4,000 women born between 1957 and 1965. The authors found that
The negative correlation between premarital cohabitation and marital quality is largely driven by the nonmarital parents in the cohabiting population. […] Furthermore, marital quality is “locked in” at the start of marriage, with lower quality marriages neither catching up nor deteriorating more rapidly than others. (p. 313, emphasis mine)
In order to put meaning to these numbers, it is important to understand how couples today are looking at marriage and cohabitation. That’s exactly the purpose of a third study in the journal, titled “The Social Construction of Marital Commitment.” The researcher interviewed 75 women and men between ages 28 and 35, most in New York state. Based on their own descriptions, participants’ commitment to marriage was made of two parts: How they saw marriage as a “life style option” that had value compared with other options like cohabitation, and how (or whether) they saw themselves actually achieving married status. Speaking to the first element (value), most of those who were not in a relationship “were reluctant to assign a value to marital commitment that distinguished it from other forms of attachment” (p. 324, emphasis mine). Even among those who did place value on marriage, there appeared to be varying degrees of belief that the kind of marriage they envisioned was actually achievable.
Together, these three articles show in stark relief just how out-of-date our knowledge about marriage could be. Mind you, it’s not that we haven’t been doing the work. Rather, it appears that generational shifts in both attitudes and behavior toward marriage have been occurring much more rapidly than we’ve been able to effectively monitor. I wonder how many more of those supposed myths about marriage may be shifting to truth, and how long it would take for those shifts to be detected.