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; government is out of the marriage business. Since the 1960s, the Supreme Court incrementally legalized every social behavior that weakens or opposes marriage, including distribution of birth control to the unmarried as a test case in their plan to legalize abortion, legal cohabitation (whether renting or buying a house together or shacking up in motels while unmarried), single parenthood without stigma in employment or adoption, and same-sex "marriage", which has diluted the truth of biology and the realities of parenthood.
Government is a huge partner in divorce, not marriage; and in exploitation, not stable, married parenthood. And a huge industry of lawyers, accountants, therapists, social workers, "child advocates" and other hangers-on are profiting massively from the evil that is "no-fault", the divorce system that removes moral accountability from both men and women and reduces marriage to a business deal—yet with few of the protections extended to actual business partners who split.
I agree with some of the above posters that marriage in today's USA can be a very risky deal for men. But it is also a very risky deal for women. Not just the children of divorce, but also society itself bear the greatest costs of the divorce industry.
It is a false equivalency to deduced that women are therefore 70% to blame for divorce. Many men see nothing wrong with serial infidelity, porn abuse, alcoholism, spouse abuse or financial abuse, expect to remain married and receive its benefits, and are shocked when the wife has finally had enough and initiates a divorce.
It's not that women cannot engage in toxic behavior also; they do, including emotional abuse, and bad behavior by females appears to be trending higher these days. But Motherhood appears to blunt the opportunities or temptations somewhat in a way that fatherhood is less capable of doing.
Without a breakdown of "deal-breaker" behaviors by sex, the percentage of each sex that initiates divorce remains relatively meaningless.
Her boyfriend knows why buy the cow when the milk is free.
She needs an IQ test
My dad told me the first time I was thinking about getting married that the first, maybe the second year it’ll be all roses and champagne; afterwards you’re down to beer and pretzels. You like the guy but it takes time to love him.
Thank you.
I unfortunately struggle to find what’s wrong with what SAM is saying. I wish I could say he’s full of it, but he isn’t .
I do mortgage lending and see many peoples finances .
Very unfortunate to see divorced guys with little to their name financially and find out an ex wife cleaned out their 401k or has a claim on their pension in a divorce .
Extremely rare to see the ex husband do this to the ex wife .
Divorce is a horrific thing .
It destroys families and hurts children a great deal.
But it is very one sided against men from what I have seen.
Since you seem a bit dense:
“Not everyone here is a bible follower or reader. “
Nothing to do with honoring God.
Rd later.
>>>70% of divorces are initiated by women.
It is a false equivalency to deduced that women are therefore 70% to blame for divorce. Many men see nothing wrong with serial infidelity, porn abuse, alcoholism, spouse abuse or financial abuse, expect to remain married and receive its benefits, and are shocked when the wife has finally had enough and initiates a divorce. <<<
NO.....you misunderstand my point. My point is that MORE WOMEN than men are dissatisfied with marriage. Yes both sexes cheat on their spouses. But girls grow up into young women with unrealistic expectations of marriage. And thus they are MUCH MORE prone to become unhappy with the basics of life. My sources on this are years of of paying attention to men’s stories on the internet as well as years of observing what women write when they discuss their plight in dating and love. Here’s an article that gets rewritten by different women all the time: WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD MEN GONE? TRANSLATION: Where are all the guys who meet my expectations that want to marry me. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Never do I see these women ask themselves how to be MORE ATTRACTIVE to a man. Never do these women ask what do men want and how can I be better than my peers to land a man. NO....women are JUST FINE THE WAY THEY ARE when you ask them. Sure there are exceptions to the rule but that is the rule. If you want to see this proof I can give you two such women. One is Suzanne Venker. She’s a marriage coach and she puts her podcasts on youtube. She argues women have unrealistic expectations in marriage. Another woman is Bettina Arndt. She also has much content on YouTube. Bettina used to be a matchmaker for women until she gave up. She would find middle aged women a nice guy and they would blow off her matches because the men don’t tick off all the boxes. She was too frustrated because at that age, the women were vastly overestimating how desirable they were while simultaneously being very judgemental and derisive about good men.
As far as the rest of what you wrote about men being mean, seriously get a grip. Those men are typical in what universe? Most men want to please their wives. If a man doesn’t want to please his wife, it’s my opinion that THE WIFE HAS ALIENATED HER HUSBAND. How much criticism, nagging, disrespect and refusing to give her husband her body can a man take before he tunes her out? If a man has such a wife and doesn’t want to end the marriage, he will tolerate her and treat her like a roommate. He will stop treating her as a wife because she no longer acts like one.
And the point of the thread was about cohabitation, and the wisdom - or lack thereof - before marriage. But you can never let go of an opportunity to subvert a thread to express your own bitterness.
Humans have biological needs, and millennia of very wise people have approved the institution of marriage to constrain and constructively direct those needs.
The fact that you are bitter about how divorce is often litigated in this country doesn’t give you the authority to condemn a time-honored institution - and your expression offends the many people here who believe in marriage, and have had good, lifelong marriages to prove it.
Poor you.
I’d have more respect for you if you would get out of your armchair, and spend some of your vitriolic energy on actually working to CHANGE the things that you see wrong.
But I guess whinging and posting on the internet are easier.
Thanks for the laugh. See ya.
Wimp.
I hit it with absolutely every woman I see.
“ and your expression offends the many people here who believe in marriage, and have had good, lifelong marriages to prove it.”
Hold on Francis. You are using the same low information emotive reactive tactics that the left uses.
I pointed out the correct factual information that I have observed in 20 years of my career and what I have seen.
But you don’t care about that.
One can simultaneously hold two separate ideas, remember those days?
It used to be called discussion .
Yes marriage is an awesome thing.
But yes as well that many men are treated horribly in divorce.
Maybe you need to have some compassion on the great guys who were taken to the cleaner by a spouse who wasn’t a nice person .
Get out of your narrow circle and show compassion to people who have suffered terrible hurt.
Yes it does happen .
But as I mentioned above, that doesn’t take away from the fact that marriage is the preferred option .
Thanks for re-affirming my views. People will read this thread and your responses have given what I’ve said even more credibility.
Yes, you appear to be legendary for that particular behavior...
Oh, I think a lot of people will agree with me.
I do not doubt that you think that.
My response was largely to SAM. I included you as a courtesy.
But again - why aren’t these disgruntled men trying to DO something ‘activist’ about this, instead of just complaining about it at every opportunity?
(Remember those days when you could CHANGE things, if you actually put forth the effort?)
I seem a bit dense? Well aren’t you a charmer
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