![]() ![]() Many people don’t get divorced until many years into their marriage, and the social norms around cohabitation in the U.S. For one, she says, it’s hard to study divorce in ways that are useful and accurate, because the best data sets take so long to collect. Galena Rhoades, a psychologist at the University of Denver, has a few theories as to why it’s so difficult to glean what effect, if any, cohabitation has on marital stability. In 2012, a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family concluded that “since the mid-1990s, whether men or women cohabited with their spouse prior to marriage is not related to marital stability.” This is the same journal that just published a study finding the opposite. seems to have just gotten to this threshold. Steffen Reinhold, of the University of Mannheim’s Research Institute for the Economics of Aging, pointed out in a 2010 study that in European countries, the correlation disappeared when the cohabitation-before-marriage rate among married adults reached about 50 percent the U.S. Indeed, as cohabitation has become more normalized, it has ceased to be so strongly linked to divorce. However, over the years, many researchers began wondering whether earlier findings that linked cohabitation to divorce were a relic of a time when living together before marriage was an unconventional thing to do. One such study questioned whether the relationship between cohabitation and divorce was a product of selection: Could it just be that people who were more likely to consider divorce an option were more likely to live together unmarried? Intuitively, a trial run of living together before marriage should increase the stability of a relationship. ![]() But in the curious, still-developing story of whether cohabitation does or doesn’t affect the odds of divorce, subjectivity on the part of researchers and the public may also play a leading role.Īfter a landmark study from 1992 suggested a link between living together and divorce, a flurry of subsequent studies investigated why this might be. Differences in researchers’ methodologies and priorities account for some of that disagreement. The practice has been studied for more than 25 years, and there’s been significant disagreement from the start as to whether premarital cohabitation increases couples’ risk of divorce. And, this isn’t the first time researchers have come to differing conclusions about the implications of premarital cohabitation. Both studies analyzed several cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth, a longitudinal data set of women (and men, starting in 2002) between the ages of 15 and 44, though Kuperberg’s study incorporates some data from another survey as well. It’s not unheard-of for contemporaneous studies on the same topic to reach opposite conclusions, but it’s somewhat surprising for them to do so after analyzing so much of the same data. ![]() In fact, since 2000, premarital cohabitation has actually been associated with a lower rate of divorce, once factors such as religiosity, education, and age at co-residence are accounted for.” ![]() But as the rate of premarital cohabitation ballooned to some 70 percent, “its association with divorce faded. From the 1950s through 1970, “those who were willing to transgress strong social norms to cohabit … were also more likely to transgress similar social norms about divorce,” wrote the author, Arielle Kuperberg, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It supported earlier research linking premarital cohabitation to increased risk of divorce.īut just two weeks later, the Council on Contemporary Families-a nonprofit group at the University of Texas at Austin-published a report that came to the exact opposite conclusion: Premarital cohabitation seemed to make couples less likely to divorce. Late last month, the Journal of Marriage and Family published a new study with a somewhat foreboding finding: Couples who lived together before marriage had a lower divorce rate in their first year of marriage, but had a higher divorce rate after five years. ![]()
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