Posted on 03/01/2006 7:09:06 AM PST by ZGuy
In the United States, living together instead of marrying has become the norm for couples -- half of young adults aged 20-40 are cohabiting instead of getting married. Cohabitation has increased nearly 1,000% since 1980, and the marriage rate has dropped more than 40% since 1960.
Some see substituting living together for marriage as an insignificant shift in family “structure.” Those who are better informed realize that the shift has disastrous ramifications for the individuals involved, as well as for society and public policy.
The faulty reasoning leading young adults to make such a poor choice must be exposed. Here are four myths surrounding the shift.
Myth No. 1: Living Together Is a Good Way to “Test the Water”
Many couples say that they want to live together to see if they are compatible, not realizing that cohabitation is more a preparation for divorce than a way to strengthen the likelihood of a successful marriage -- the divorce rates of women who cohabit are nearly 80% higher than those who do not. In fact, studies indicate that cohabiting couples have lower marital quality and increased risk of divorce. Further, cohabiting relationships tend to be fragile and relatively short in duration; less than half of cohabiting relationships last five or more years. Typically, they last about 18 months.
Myth No. 2: Couples Don’t Really Need That “Piece of Paper”
A major problem with cohabitation is that it is a tentative arrangement that lacks stability; no one can depend upon the relationship -- not the partners, not the children, not the community, nor the society. Such relationships contribute little to those inside and certainly little to those outside the arrangement. Sometimes couples choose to live together as a substitute for marriage, indicating that, in case the relationship goes sour, they can avoid the trouble, expense and emotional trauma of a divorce. With such a weak bond between the two parties, there is little likelihood that they will work through their problems or that they will maintain the relationship under pressure.
Myth No. 3: Cohabiting Relationships Usually Lead to Marriage
During the 1970s, about 60% of cohabiting couples married each other within three years, but this proportion has since declined to less than 40%. While women today still tend to expect that “cohabitation will lead to marriage,” numerous studies of college students have found that men typically cohabit simply because it is “convenient.” In fact, there is general agreement among scholars that living together before marriage puts women at a distinct disadvantage in terms of “power.” A college professor described a survey that he conducted over a period of years in his marriage classes. He asked guys who were living with a girl, point blank, “Are you going to marry the girl that you’re living with?” The overwhelming response, he reports, was “NO!” When he asked the girls if they were going to marry the guy they were living with, their response was, “Oh, yes; we love each other and we are learning how to be together.”
Myth No. 4: Cohabiting Relationships Are More Egalitarian Than Marriage
It is common knowledge that women and children suffer more poverty after a cohabiting relationship breaks up, but it’s not so well understood that there is typically an economic imbalance in favor of the man within such relationships, too. While couples who live together say that they plan to share expenses equally, more often than not the women support the men. Studies show that women typically contribute more than 70% of the income in a cohabiting relationship. Likewise, the women tend to do more of the cleaning, cooking and laundry. If they are students, as is often the case, and facing economic or time constraints that require a reduction in class load, it is almost invariably the woman, not the man, who drops a class.
So What’s the Conclusion?
A mass of sociological evidence shows that cohabitation is an inferior alternative to the married, intact, two-parent, husband-and-wife family. Increasingly, the myths of living together without marriage are like a mirror shattered by the force of the facts that expose the reality of cohabitation.
Dr. Crouse is senior fellow of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute.
Agreed.
Dating is for fun.
Courtship is to get to know the person as a potential lifetime mate.
In this case lineage has more to do with the family fortune than the family jewels...
Would you ask your children what they wanted?
And vice versa. I already posted a response to the rest of your post in a previous post. Most of the men I know who lived with women, weren't doing it for sex. They were already sleeping with their girlfriends.
Having sex before marriage is wrong. I stay away from the word whores for men or women, because it is a dehumanizing term even if accurate. And it fails to win converts to the abstinence before marriage position.
You thought feminism and the sexual revolution were GOOD ideas?
I never thought so, even as a teenager.
Take a look at http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001196.cfm -- it provides a nice summary/comparison of the two relationship development models.
YMMV.
Equal pay for equal work sounded good.
Equal career opportuninty sounded good.
Education and the Vote sounded good...
Frankly, they still do. :)
Thank you. Read the article. Personally, it's nothing I would encourage my daughter's to do, but that's just me.
Well, yes, I would agree. But those things would have been accomplished without the feminists.
Your genes survive but your name doesn't. In biblical terms you would be cut off from your people. I know to some presevring the family line is no big deal, but to me it's a major part of being a man. One of our duties is to preserve the lineage.
There's men (and I use the term very loosley here) who have preserved their genes all over the place. But once they are dead no one will remember and no one will care because they didn't give the children their name and they didn't invest themselves into their children to make a change in the world for the better.
I'm extremely happy I never lived in more repressive times.
My father's name will die with him, not because he has any illegitimate children but because both of us are female. Fortunately for him, my last name is one of the most common in the U.S.
Since that time the motivation has changed.
The courtship idea in the link had some good points but is a bit too restrictive for my taste, and at this point, could never be implemented into the general population.
But some people do practice it, and successfully. My wife and I did, for example.
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