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.
No, I won’t stop reminding people that the very bad life advice they are handing to young men is not biblical. This is supposed to be a God honoring site.
Agree most of the marriage laws - actually all in a sense since they redefined it as any twosome - are not biblical.
The solution is for us to be MORE biblical - not less!
Later in the article, it is revealed that that same daughter had gotten pregnant at age 18. So there was also a 4-year-old (grand)child in the equation - yet this is totally elided in the story.
Regards,
THANK YOU for posting this.
J1630 has a point. In your anger and bitterness, you do broad brush and condemn all women and don’t pass up opportunities to do so even on threads that have nothing to do with marriage. FR is not your personal platform for you to lash out and hurt all women to get back at the one who hurt you.
It’s true that the courts are beyond unjust towards men and that there are many women who work the system to screw men over. But it’s not ALL women.
Many women have put up with much abuse before their divorce, and have to put up with men who simply refuse to follow the courts ordered child support and alimony.
It goes both ways and men are not exempt from being guilty of wronging women either. And there are many men and women both who put up with bad marriages and work to make them better. Many have far more integrity that you seem to think they have.
So, let go of your anger and bitterness against women as a whole because of the woman who wronged you. I am not responsible for what happened between the two of you and should not be held accountable for the actions of someone I never met. By taking your anger out on women like you do, that is what you are doing, expecting us to answer for someone else’s actions.
I know someone who saw nothing wrong with cohabitation and lived with the man she eventually married for about three years, the following marriage lasted about four and a half years. No children, she said she was terrified of becoming pregnant and being abandoned by her husband, because she had seen this happen to her friends. When I asked her if they'd gotten married first before becoming pregnant she became very vague and said they'd been "together."
I don't think the cohabitation led to a stronger union in all these cases. It seemed in each instance that it made the man very free to leave (even when there were children) when he felt like it.
You’re right that a marriage should be Christ centered.
Getting married for any other reason is asking for trouble because when that reason changes, the marriage has nothing left to be based on.
So the guy who marries thinking it’s all about as much sex as he wants, or the woman who marries for financial reasons, are in big trouble when the sex or money is no longer forthcoming. The whole basis for their marriage is gone and they don’t know what to do with it.
My poor grandmother was married to a nasty, abusive man and after about 6 kids, suggested slowing things down some, and his response was *I got married to have a good time*.
They went on to have 7 more children. And she was stuck with him because in those days, you did NOT divorce. For any reason.
When he died, she could not have cared less.
And the same thing happens to women with husbands.
The dating culture is one build on false pretenses. You are always on your best behavior, looking your best, being accommodating because it’s just a date and not something you are looking at dealing with for the next 30-40 years.
People in love get carried away with their feelings and it clouds their judgment.
Then they wake up some day to reality and have no tools with which to cope.
i didn’t say all women. please stop lying about what i said.
but its ENOUGH women, when combined with the courts, and combined with divorce statistics, to make it an extreme risk for a man, which outweighs any benefits it may offer for a guy. Plus then consider many women already have backup men already picked out in case they want to leave their current man. i refer to this article here discussing a womens survey:
All of this should give any man great concern about getting married.
If the finances and courts and divorce stats were reversed, how many of you women would sign the marriage contract? If you had the same deal men have now, you would be running away so fast your heels would turn into flats.
and no one has yet even mentioned any benefit for men today in marriage. likemyou the response is to attack the speaker. and you also make a straw man to attack, as you assume a whole bunch of things you have no evidence to support.
Marriage is a horrible deal for men today. I don’t recommend it. Everything I see in statistics about it, and the law and how men are treated, its just not a good deal for men. Instead of just trying ad hoc tearing me down/insults, why not present a real case for marriage for men?
If someone is getting married because it’s a “deal” for them, just to personally gain from it, they are only using the other person for their own selfish goals and that marriage is doomed.
And yes, you do broad brush all women. I’ve read enough of your posts over the years.
You don’t have to ”say” is it in so many words to say it. So, no, I am not lying and I am not the only one who sees it.
• A financial return that includes higher earnings, more assets and more job stability. Married men make about $16,000 more than their single peers with otherwise similar backgrounds.
If the marriage is not a solid jointly-oriented economic partnership, the additional money supports a woman who then manages the balance for her warped idea of the good of the family in a way that does amazing things (claiming to do so for the good of the children and for the good of the man that he cannot conceive of as good for himself) that the man would not have time or have dreamed of himself .
No you are a liar. I did not say what you claim, those words are nowhere in my posts. Liar.
you know exactly what i mean when i used that phrase with “deal”. you are feigning ignorance. The context is marriage is a bad deal for men in relation ot it being a good deal for women, you know exactly what I’ve been talking about. Only one person benefits from marriage today and it’s not the guy. And you are fine with it because you,know women are the ones that almost always benefit.
i said it more than one way and every way i have said it, no one has ever put forth an answer just attacks and insults.
explain why marriage is a good thing for men.
tell me all the positives. unless you are of the opinion men should do things that are not good for them just because its expected of them, or its their duty to do things that aren’t beneficial to them.
Why shouldn’t marriage be beneficial for men? It is for women. If it wasn’t women wouldn’t be from childhood on dreaming about their wedding day and being married. If marriage doesn’t have to be beneficial for men then what’s the point of getting married for men, then? What kind of marriage is it if only the woman gets benefits? Not a fair or happy one for the man, that’s for sure.
“Why buy a cow when you get milk free? And would any woman that stupid be worth keeping?”
My dad told me once to “never order food at a strip bar” so... Since strippers supposedly can’t cook, or... did I get the meaning of the message wrong there?
When I was in the service there was a guy that was getting a divorce and his wife literally had hundreds of sexual liaisons while he was deployed, she confessed it to him, to her psychologist, her family... all knew about it when the “big news” broke, and despite the fact that she was totally unfaithful to anything, even her decency, the court still gave her half of everything, the house had to be sold and this poor fellow was nearing the end of a good career, with no place to live, no investments left, and on half rations.
He felt blessed, he told me. Blessed because with all of her sexual trysts, he never got and STD. He doesn’t know why that is, but he feels blessed. He was devoted to his marriage until he was hit upside the head with the lie of it all.
Sadly he’s emotionally ruined, he will never trust another woman, and time is such that he will never have a normal family. If there even is such a thing.
What is the source of this post — is it your individual testimony, or did you find an article and forget to link it?
If that were my premise. You see what you do?
You're not happy or successful because of the obvious anger and hatred you have toward the institution of marriage, and obviously went through some terrible experiences. It's logic, and most everyone can deduce that from your posts, Sherlock.
Love is not a feeling. It is a rational decision.
People often say "love" when they mean "infatuation." Infatuation is the feeling most people today equate with love. Infatuation will fade with time, though hopefully never go completely away.
Love is the decision one makes every day--no matter the presence of infatuation or not.
Excellent post; thank you.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.