Been waiting a while to use this ... you win the prize.
Posted on 10/27/2014 1:18:28 PM PDT by millegan
One interesting aspect of undergoing a dramatic conversion as an adult is that it’s given me the opportunity to be deeply immersed in two rather different cultures. Up until my mid-20s, I was very much a part of post-Christian secular culture. Then my husband and I changed our religious beliefs, and though we’re still in touch with many of our old friends, we’ve increasingly found ourselves in social circles where most people are religious.
In general, there are plenty of similarities between our old and new groups of friends. Both consist of smart, nice folks who are curious about the world and strive to be good people. They have the same types of jobs, like a lot of the same sports teams, and do many of the same things for fun. But one huge difference between these two cultures is the way they approach marriage and relationships.
(Excerpt) Read more at churchpop.com ...
Most people think by shacking up they get the best of both worlds, marriage and being single.
Usually they wind up with the worst of both worlds.
Be married. Or be single. Don’t try to have it both ways.
Momma asked my sister why would a man buy the cow when the milk is free?
If your going to post an excerpt, at least post the reason.
One interesting aspect of undergoing a dramatic conversion as an adult is that it’s given me the opportunity to be deeply immersed in two rather different cultures. Up until my mid-20s, I was very much a part of post-Christian secular culture. Then my husband and I changed our religious beliefs, and though we’re still in touch with many of our old friends, we’ve increasingly found ourselves in social circles where most people are religious.
In general, there are plenty of similarities between our old and new groups of friends. Both consist of smart, nice folks who are curious about the world and strive to be good people. They have the same types of jobs, like a lot of the same sports teams, and do many of the same things for fun. But one huge difference between these two cultures is the way they approach marriage and relationships.
In secular circles, it was commonplace for couples to move in together as soon as their relationships got serious, often not getting married until years later. There wasn’t even a stigma about it. Living together (the thinking went) had the advantage of saving money on rent, and gave couples a much-needed opportunity to see if they could happily live under the same roof before making a bigger commitment. In fact, for many people, it was out of respect for the institution of marriage that they chose to cohabitate. “I never want to get divorced,” one friend told me as she moved her belongings into her boyfriend’s apartment, “so it’s important to me to make sure we can really work together before going through with a wedding.”
It was a big change, then, when I found myself surrounded by couples who didn’t move in together until they returned from their honeymoons. Young people who weren’t yet married either lived with their parents or made significant financial and lifestyle sacrifices to maintain separate residences, and the married couples told humorous stories of adjusting to the first few months in the same house after their weddings. When I got an up-close glimpse into this system, I was amazed by how well it worked. Obviously, I thought it made sense from the moral perspective I’d adopted upon my conversion; but what was most interesting was how much sense it made on a purely practical level as well. Following these age-old customs really did seem to lead people to enjoy their courtships more and to have happier, stronger marriages.
Ever since then, I have strongly recommended to friends who are still in the dating scene that they reject cohabitation, regardless of their religious beliefs. Here are a few reasons why:
1. It makes it too easy to drift into marriage
Practical problems like financial pressures or roommate issues can make moving in with your boyfriend or girlfriend seem to be the easiest solution, whether or not you’re certain that this is the person you want to be with for the rest of your life.
Then, as the months turn into years and you’re still under the same roof, you naturally start thinking about marriage — if nothing else because it seems to be the next logical step. If you’ve been living together long enough and things are going fine, eventually there’s a subtle pressure that makes it seem like having a wedding is something you should do. And when you haven’t had the space (literally) to take a step back and objectively consider whether this person is truly the best match for you, the situation is ripe for sliding into marriage by default, rather than getting married as an active, conscious choice that you’re genuinely thrilled about.
2. It makes the proposal anti-climactic
Ah, the marriage proposal. From time immemorial it’s been romanticized as a huge climax in two people’s lives — and most of the romance comes from the idea that the man and woman are entering into a huge new commitment together. A proposal can still be beautiful and touching if you’re already living together, but it’ll lack a certain gravitas.
If you’re already engaging in all the intimacy and sacrifice that comes with making a home together, the moment of the big decision has long passed; in a way, your engagement is already over even before rings get involved.
3. It renders most wedding traditions meaningless
Most wedding traditions become obsolete when we view the institution from the lens of secular culture, but a few of our cherished rituals that couples most look forward to when planning a wedding are particularly hollow and superfluous if you’re already living together:
The honeymoon can still be a fun getaway for a newly married cohabitating couple, but it lacks the specialness that’s there when it’s the first time that a couple has spent extended amounts of time together under the same roof.
A father walking his daughter down the aisle has long been a sweet symbolic act of a woman going from her parents’ house to the house of her own new family, but even its symbolism becomes strained when she’s long been building a home with her new spouse.
Wedding registries were always a way that two people coming from their parents’ homes could get a jumpstart on furnishing their new digs; if you’re already set up in a fully functioning household, there’s no need for those kinds of gifts.
And though I can’t say I’d be sad to see this one go, there’s no point in hosting bachelor/bachelorette parties when the engaged couple’s last nights living on their own happened a long time beforehand.
4. It sends the message that marriage isn’t important to you
I know that most people don’t intend to send this message when they move in with their significant others; as I said above, many people I know chose to live together first out of a desire to avoid divorce. However, the message that you and your boyfriend or girlfriend send to one another when you set up house before a wedding is that marriage isn’t that important as to be worth waiting for.
When you cohabitate, you’re implicitly saying that your future marriage isn’t valuable enough to be worth tough sacrifices — and that sets a dangerous precedent for when you do take the next step in your relationship. Combine that with point #1 about drifting toward engagement by default, and it puts a crack in the foundation of your relationship that could take years to fix, if it doesn’t spread and get worse over time.
5. It limits your options
Most of the religious couples I know adhered to the idea that they’d never date someone whom they weren’t interested in marrying, at least not for long. A friend once mentioned that she had a very nice boyfriend in college whose company she enjoyed, but when it became clear that they weren’t meant to be together for life, they mutually and immediately broke it off.
When I first encountered that idea it seemed unnecessarily strict, but now it makes a lot of sense. Marriage is the most life-changing commitment you’ll ever make, and so it makes sense to order your entire dating life toward that goal. When you’re paired up with someone who is not ideal for you, you are missing opportunities to meet the person who is the man or woman of your dreams — and living together makes it hard to extricate yourself from lukewarm relationships, much more so than if you’d maintained separate residences. Sure enough, just a few days after my friend and her nice college beau parted ways, she met the man who is now her husband of fifteen years, and they have one of the strongest, most joyful marriages I’ve ever seen.
Especially in this day and age where we’re all maxed out both mentally and financially, I can see how it would seem to simplify things for couples to just move in together. But now that I’ve seen so many examples of it being done both ways, I’m convinced that the sacrifices are well worth it when you wait to set up a home until after the wedding.
(Your welcome)
I’m surprised they missed the biggest most obvious reason not to live together before marriage.
It INCREASES your chance of divorce later on.
re: It makes the proposal anti-climactic
I agree that it does for the reasons given, but it appears to me that the proposal itself, whether occurring with a couple living together or not, has become a bigger and often much more dramatic event than it was years ago. More and more proposals are being done in public with many videotaped to be uploaded to social media. What once tended to be a very private and intimate moment is no longer either.
I wonder why I never hear feminist types never complain about being compared to a cow..............Or asking what’s with a man “buying” a wife to be able to have her.........
I’ve heard this statement before, and it makes you think. If a man has all benefit of marriage, every possible thing you can think of, why would he get married??? Good question.
I hope some men respond to this, men who have lived together but didn’t marry their girlfriends. And tell us why they lived that way.
When my husband and I married after living together for 3 years, we went to the JotP. A wedding and hoop-te-do would have been hypocritical in my view. We did have a party in our honor but it was not lavish.
Been waiting a while to use this ... you win the prize.
“Momma asked my sister why would a man buy the cow when the milk is free?”
OR
Why buy the milk when you’ve got a big fat cow at home?
My son, an otherwise smart and discerning young man (not so young, he’s 35) recently got married. She HAAAAD to have the whole white dress, uncle giving her away routine, every single expensive item. Not only had he already moved in, but this was each’s second marriage. Come ON. They went into debt and promptly lost their jobs. sheesh.
Why not cohabit? Because of the risk to the babies. Even people who use birth control run a risk of its eventual failure. In fact Planned Parenthood is rather counting on it.
it takes away the mystery of whether or not your new spouse snores, steals the covers, or has cold feet.
These make it sound like you are for cohabitating rather than marriage. Is that true?
1. It makes it too easy to drift into marriage
2. It makes the proposal anti-climactic
3. It renders most wedding traditions meaningless
4. It sends the message that marriage isn’t important to you
5. It limits your options
Now for the religious reasons:
No purity
No chastity
If they did this with you had they done it before?
No real dedication to a marriage
No Sacrament of Matrimony with all its blessings and graces.
No promise to bring children up in the faith.
And there are others, these are just off the top of my head.
LOL!!!!!!!!!!
Sadly, they will probably be divorced soon!!! I have kept track for 4 decades with couples that had LAVISH EXPENSIVE weddings.......ALL but one divorced so far, and couples that had decent weddings....ALL STILL MARRIED!!!
I’m afraid I can say no more. My “self” wants to, believe me. But I must not. He loves her very much. That I can say.
Cohabitation runs down the value of a woman in the dating market, so to speak, while the man’s value remains the same.
That is, to say, that an unmarried woman at 35 fresh out of a live-in relationship is ‘used goods’. Her chances of marriage or success in love are dwindling. Her biological clock is rapidly ticking away; a man doesn’t face this consequence.
If feminism had an ounce of honesty, they’d be all over this. Hell, if they had any honesty they’d be prosecuting older men who impregnate minors. But I digress.
That is so sad about your son and his wife. We were in our thirties too when we married. My husband wanted a wedding, but it was his second, my first, we never attended church. I just couldn’t do go to a church or wear a white dress or pretend something I wasn’t.
So we planned to marry at lunchtime on a weekday. I was scheduled to work a whole day but asked my boss if I could leave early. When she asked why, I told her I was going to get married. My husband’s two best friends were our witnesses. We all met at the court house and after a brief ceremony, which was charming, we had drinks at a hotel with our two friends. Later we had dinner at a nice restaurant and spent the night in the hotel. We went to work the next day. It couldn’t have been a nicer wedding. But it wasn’t just wisdom or being a hypocrit that made me avoid the whole nine yards of tulle . . .
My husband and I are very argumentative and while I wanted to marry because I had spent 3 years with him, I knew it wasn’t a great idea. We weren’t well suited to be truthful. So I didn’t want my family to spend money on something that was sure to be a waste. I would only risk spending a little. Isn’t that awful? And we have had some very hard times mostly because of our lack of maturity and poor planning, but you know, once God entered my life, my whole outlook changed regarding my marriage and my husband. God has transformed a rocky relationship to a relationship that rests on rock. While life is still difficult, I would still choose to marry my hubby. God is amazing when a person stops denying Him and starts following Him.
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