I don’t think the young people consider marriage as their goal. Rather playing house seems to be the idea. Room mates with benifits says it too.
Most young girls are under the false hope the ‘arrangement’ will one day lead to marriage. Even if they don’t think so the day does come where she always starts feeling used as she looks to the future.
I worked with a gal who lived with a man for 5 yrs and she began feeling like nothing more than a kept women. He owned everything and she didn’t have any ‘security’ if something happened to him.
That poor girl. She bought the “you don’t know someone until you live with them, so live with them first.”
Marriage is about two people saying they’re vulnerable enough to risk their entire lives with the other person and withhold nothing…even an escape route of things don’t work out.
Living together is “I only like you this much. I will see if I love you enough to marry you. But for now, let’s have sex, but still withhold major portions of our lives with each other.””
There’s no stability in that and that’s not love.