Yes the men I’m talking about were complaining about how different a live in was from a wife. They were resentful that the wedding changed everything. I speculate that their wives stopped auditioning and started living.
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.
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.