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.
“I was taught that God is Love.”
Moral revisionism.
Where in the bible does it say to love God?
People are commanded to obey God and love each other.
Oh, Good Grief.
Try Luke 10:27
and John 4:8 and :16
“trying to DO something ‘activist’ about this, “
I think laws should be changed
Well, I’m not sure it’s ‘laws’ that are doing this. We see Law being set aside all over, recently.
But if it is, laws don’t get changed without people getting actively behind a movement to accomplish that.
Complaining and expressing your jaundice every chance you get on a website just doesn’t do it
I've heard all the stories from both women and men.
Some people (both men and women) take advantage of other people.
It's sad, and sometimes the system stinks, and sometimes men complain about women, and sometimes women complain about men.
But, one group (women or men) really isn't to blame for everything.
And than you for posting this. It’s tiresome to have this hoary old factoid trotted out as evidence.
Hahahahaha! this thread needed a good zinger!
i didn’t say one group is to blame for everything.
I am very clear about what i do say. I didn’t say that.
What you have observed and what you have seen outside of a double-blind controlled study are empirical evidence, not necessarily factual evidence nor statistically valid analysis. Every observer has bias. Opinions, inferences and feelings aren't facts.
“Opinions, inferences and feelings aren’t facts. “
Then get out and and talk to real people . If you have any interest past making comments on the web .
I’m not a18 year old, I don’t require you or anyone else to tell what I have experienced and learned with decades of hard work, is just something I made up.
Real people have been hurt with these abusive actions.
Have some empathy for them, it could easily be you or someone you care about,
Sadly, the law doesn't care whether a spouse has cheated. Whether the husband cheated on the wife, or the wife cheated on the husband, makes no difference in divorce court.
The judges don't want to hear all the details or listen to arguments, either.
So, today, all divorces follow this formula (at least in my state):
- Whichever spouse earns more is the one who pays alimony. Alimony stops if the one collecting it remarries (or moves in with a partner, but good luck proving that).
- Whichever spouse stays in the house gets the house, but must fork over half the equity to the other spouse (or they must sell the house and split the equity 50/50).
- Unless one parent is dangerous, both parents share joint legal custody, but whichever parent stays with the kids gets primary physical custody, whereas the parent who moves out gets visitation. (The courts don't care why the parent moved out.)
- Child support is calculated based on the parents' incomes and the number of nights the kids spend with each parent.
It's not a perfect formula, and there's much more to it. But it has nothing to do with gender.
But, you're not seeing the whole story. You're seeing only one part of it.
Uh, you just doubled down.
Feelings aren’t facts.
Marriage is God ordained and the only institution for the legitimate expression of sex. He condemns sex outside marriage.
God is the one who said that it is not good for man to be alone and instituted marriage and how it is to operate. Anyone who advocates against marriage goes against God’s design for humanity and family.
It’s the mechanism by which children are to be brought into the world and raised. (Malachi 2:13-16 And this second thing you do. You cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. But you say, “Why does he not?” Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God[g] seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. “For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless.”
Men are to love their wives as Christ loves the church and gave Himself for it, and women are to respect their husbands and obey them as Christ. Men are to protect, provide, and lead. Women are to submit and respect. Actually both are to submit to each other and not deny each other sex.
The big problem with marriage these days is that too many people are in it for themselves and their own personal benefit and what they can get out of it. That cannot and will not ever work. It’s selfish lust and not sacrificial love.
There’s plenty of blame to go around in who is at fault for a marriage gone south. It isn’t only women as some here would like us to believe as if men are perfect and can do no wrong.
A spouse can file for divorce in a state that the other spouse has never been to yet now is beholden to that state.
Was it Lauren Bacall who said maybe a couple should live next to each other in separate houses and visit each other?
I never realized that either!
Great song, though!
Okay any advice would be appreciated.
I am 58; been married to the same man for 31 years.
However he no longer wants to be intimate with me. Tonight I tried to please him but he pushed me away.
He doesn’t want a divorce because he says I make him laugh.
He has me living in a home for seniors with Alzheimers. Been here a year and a half. He doesn’t want me home, where my dog is.
I am not happy with divorce but I want to feel like a man thinks I’m pretty and wants to be with me.
Not sure why I posted this; just feeling lonely in the old-timers place.
Perfect point.
Thank you, that is wonderful of you to say.
It has everything to do with the roles that are accorded based upon people's beliefs about gender.
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