Posted on 06/29/2021 5:15:45 PM PDT by CharlesOConnell
"Mom, Joe and I have decided to live together," my strong-willed 23-year-old daughter announced defiantly at our dining-room table, her boyfriend at her side.
Her words made my heart pound and my stomach churn. "Have either of you even thought about the possibility you could get pregnant?"
My daughter looked sheepishly at her boyfriend, admitting they hadn't. The defiance swept over her face again and she replied, "Well, I don't care what you and Dad think. You'll just have to accept it."
"We may have to tolerate it," I said firmly. "But we'll never accept it. You're going, against every value taught you."
As she and her 24-year-old boyfriend marched out the door, I was heartbroken. It was one of the great sorrows of my life.
I couldn't convince my daughter that by entering a relationship of sex without marriage she could be making the worst mistake of her life. But since then I've learned unsettling facts about cohabitation. My hope is that what I learned will help other young people and parents facing the same situation. (The U.S. Census Bureau says 6,085,284 unmarried, opposite-sex partners live together. [Written in 1994]) Here's what I found:
Estimates from a number of experts are that 40 to 50 percent of cohabitants never marry each other. One 1985 Columbia University study found only 19 percent of men who lived with their girlfriends eventually walked down the aisle with them.
I also learned that in many live-in relationship differently, frequently the result of failing to discuss what they expect of each other. When 139 cohabiting students were asked why they lived with' somebody, most women said it was a first step toward marriage. For men, the most common motive was sex. One man, asked why he was living with his girlfriend, replied, "Sex-when you want it, where you want it Though that particular inquiry is now years old, and the fear of AIDS has changed attitudes toward sex, I found from the people I've talked to that many cohabitants still don't talk about what they expect from living together.
Many young couples today insist that living Together Is a good idea, the best way to see if they are compatible-and hence the best way to prevent divorce. The truth? One study found that people who live together before marriage are about 33 percent more likely to split up than those who don't. Another study showed that the longer they live together before marriage, the more likely they themselves thought their chance of divorce. Moreover, the study says, cohabitants have a lower reported quality of marriage and a lower commitment to it.
As Connecticut psychologist Joseph Nowinski explains, "Living together, while frequently touted as an intensely bold, romantic move, is often really a way to avoid full commitment. When two people opt for living together over marriage, one or both of them are often secretly saying, I'm worried my love for you is too fragile to last a lifetime, So I want a quick escape hatch if the going gets rough'. "
A broken heart can't be prevented just by refusing to sign on the dotted line. When live-in couples split, the emotional fallout is often as deeply painful as divorce. University of Southern California clinical psychologist Michael Newcomb explains: "Live-in couples usually become as emotionally attached as married couples. The problem is, it is easier for even a small problem to drive them apart because they just don't have the glue that married couples do to hold them together-such as kids, shared finances, a legal document."
Steve Jaccarino, a contractor in Westport, Conn., and his girlfriend broke up mainly because they disagreed over where they wanted to settle. Today, ten years later, Steve still imagines her coming back into his life. "I'm not over her," he says.
This was one of my deepest concerns. Five years before my daughter announced she was going to live with her boyfriend, she had made the same mistake. At age 18, she had run away from home to live with another boy-and bad gotten pregnant. When he deserted her, my daughter was so devastated and unable to cope that for years the burden of raising the baby had fallen on my husband's and my shoulders.
When another young woman I know of lived with a man, she accidentally got pregnant with twins. Her live-in lover stayed with her until she was seven months along and jobless, then phoned her parents one night and announced, "Come and get your very pregnant daughter." For the next 18 years, she raised her twin boys alone, often barely able to buy food or pay rent. Fully 44 percent of unwed mothers will live in poverty.
Frequently, people who live together first are miserable after marriage. Common problems include: lower overall ability to communicate-less ability to resolve quarrels. In one study, wives who' cohabited before the wedding complained especially about the poor quality of communication with their mates. Clearly, when it comes to marriage, practicing beforehand doesn't make perfect. On the contrary, in a study reported in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, the longer couples had lived together before marriage, the more unhappy they were.
A 1989 study found physical attacks are more common and more severe among live-in couples than among those who are married. Isolation from their families may be a reason for this, the study's authors concluded.
Another survey showed a startling 40 per cent of cohabiting women were forced to endure a kind of sex they disliked. Moreover, since there is often no commitment to be sexually exclusive, those who cohabit may be put at a higher-than-average risk for sexually transmitted diseases such as genital herpes, chlamydia and AIDS.
At age 19, one Palm Springs, California woman offered to let her unemployed boyfriend-move in with her. She recalls: "He was living with his ex-girlfriend at the time. I figured if he moved in with me, he'd be all mine. Instead, I wound up doing all the work and paying all the bills while he was secretly sleeping with her in my bed. It was a bad mistake."
Cohabiting is often portrayed as trouble-free and offering all the joys of marriage with none of the responsibilities. Nonsense!
One young man I know attests to the falsity of this argument. He moved in with his fiancee three months before their wedding. Today he says, "We had all the disagreements of marriage Who does the dishes? Who pays the bills?-without the commitment to hold us together. If we had lived together longer, we might have broken up. When you aren't married and you fight, you don't ever have to work it out if you don't want to. You can just walk away."
Frequently, the woman sees living together as romantic, while the man views the arrangement as a "practical" solution that will help them iron out differences and strengthen their love by destroying any foolish romantic fantasies they may have about each other. In fact, live-in couples may find it harder to build lasting love precisely because they have lost their starry-eyed, romantic "illusions."
Family therapists Judy and Jim Sellner, authors of Loving for Life, say that rich, lasting love goes through several distinct stages. The first is the "romantic" phase when love is wild and idealistic, when couples believe they have found their "one true love" with whom they will "live happily ever after."
It is an absolutely wonderful time, and couples should linger over it and just enjoy the candlelight dinners, the swooning, the craziness of it all. Cutting it short to rush into living together could be a major mistake. Say the Sellners: Couples who weather the tumultuous power-struggle and conflict stages and sail smoothly on to a more peaceful period in which they understand and handle their differences are those whom manage to recall the "overly idealized" visions of each other they enjoyed in the first romantic stage of courtship.
The day my daughter said she was moving in with her boyfriend, I knew some of these facts and shared them with her-to no avail. But over the past few years, as I continued to learn about the data on living together, I was even more convinced it was the wrong thing to do. I became so determined to get this information out to people-and to help young women and men avoid or cope with the pregnancies that all too often result from living together-that I started a support group for unwed parents, which advocates premarital abstinence. My daughter, now 35 and much wiser, is active in the organization and tells anyone who will listen that living together is absolutely the wrong way to go.
As our children become young adults, we can no longer make decisions for them. Nor can we completely keep them from harm. But at least we can arm them with all the facts we can find. We can then only pray they'll make the right choices.
Kind of a strange story to me. What young couple today in their early 20s - actually planning to live together - doesn’t know about and practice birth control?
Story would have been more realistic if the daughter wasn’t ‘sheepish’, but said, with the typical confidence of youth, that she had ‘taken care of that’.
(Well, within one percent or so...)
Preparation for marriage. They’d have to detail how that works. First place the statistics on marriage lasting for previous cohabitators is seriously compromised
But...girls- tell us exactly how it works. Really.
Prep for marriage includes knowing I’d the guy dotes on his Controlling mother to a sick extent. Can you count on him in a pinch. Get off birth control pills and see how you like him. Pregnant women and women on the pill (hormonally the same) look for different qualities in a man than a celibate woman who is seeking a mate and vice versa. Does he open the door without a fuss, without looking for accolades and adoration, but to consider himself a gentleman (no gentleman has sex outside of marriage, BTW) ditto remove his hat indoors and please in church. Does he go to church? On his own?
Who are his friends
Gynosociety has removed every single benefit from marriage for men.
There is no benenfit anymore, just risk and financial hardship. And on top of it, no one cares about risks for men,,or their financial hardships.
If women got the same deal men get in marriage and divorce, no woman in their right kind would agree to get married.
And they know this.
And married guys also know his,,especially those who have been through the grinder.
Yet they don’t tell young men the truth. They all want them to get screwed over just like they were, because society wants them to and many dumbass guys think, well no one warned me, why should I warn them?
Prepping for marriage involves a whole lot of things starting with acknowledging Yeshua as being the head of the family. You like someone to begin with and you develop your love for each other over time.
Sorry that this poor guy failed at parenting.
By the time they realized their mistake, it was too late. Many apparently completely tune out to their kids until the kids are in their teens and starting to “act out”. But it’s already too late by then. I am sorry to say.
What you do when they are very young pays dividends when they are teens. There is no playing catchup later.
We can always count on you, SAM.
It must have been one horrible divorce...
“As she and her 24-year-old boyfriend marched out the door, I was heartbroken. It was one of the great sorrows of my life. “
The big question is: Did she ever come back?
Oh, and they were most likely already having sex.
I suspect the only thing dad accomplished was an expression of his beliefs and the animus of his daughter.
I tried telling my son not toarry tye woman he was living with. And not because of the living together part. His reponse. “ Im not about to take marriage advise from a guy whos been divorced twice”. nice comback son.. . I told him next time his car needs to be fixed,to be sure the guy working on it has never worked on a car before. .
“What young couple today in their early 20s - actually planning to live together - doesn’t know about and practice birth control?”
We ran a charity giving baby showers to moms who didn’t abort. We found that many lower class women won’t use birth control because they want children. This was after Clinton got rid of welfare. There are strong biological urges that people have, they’ve been artificially taken out of a stable society that will straighten them out. It’s not very simple.
Like my grandmother used to say, “Why buy a cow when you can get milk for free?”
As opposed to one of those good divorces?
Traci Lords in the bedroom, Julia Child in the kitchen. Still a fantasy.
“Yet they don’t tell young men the truth.”
I tell every young man, which by happenstance the discussion comes up, to take their future into their own hands, put on a condom and never marry.
And there ought to be a mandatory course in high school and boot camp: The unwritten, binding clauses of the marriage contract.
That contract is with all levels of US government and most other nations. Not with the girl that wants you to sign it.
It doesn’t sound as if we’re talking about a ‘lower class’ woman in your original post.
Studies from 1985 and 1994 probably don’t mean much these days.
Your post illustrates yet again, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Go ahead, convince me how great a deal marriage is for a man in America, today.
Why buy a cow, when you get the milk for free. (from the Mary Tyler Moore show)
Excellent post!
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