Free Republic

Couples who live together before they get married are less likely to stay married, a new study has found. But their chances improve if they were already engaged when they began living together. The likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first, the study found. The study of men and women ages 15 to 44 was done by the National Center for Health Statistics using data from the National Survey of Family Growth conducted in 2002. The authors define cohabitation as people who live with a...

WILMINGTON, N.C. - A former sheriff's dispatcher who quit her job after her boss found out she lived with her boyfriend is challenging North Carolina's law against cohabitation. Debora Hobbs said she was told to get married, move out, or find another job after her boss found out about her living situation. The legal arm of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina filed the lawsuit Monday on her behalf. The lawsuit seeks to abolish the nearly 200-year-old - and rarely enforced - law that prohibits unmarried, unrelated adults of the opposite sex from living together. North Carolina is...

An unmarried couple who are the parents of a 2-year-old child may be forced to separate because cohabitation is illegal in North Carolina and would violate the woman's probation. Melissa Sheridan said she has about two years of probation left for welfare fraud in New York state. She moved to North Carolina a few months ago with her boyfriend, John Finger. New York allowed her to leave with the assumption North Carolina would supervise her probation, but North Carolina has refused because she and Finger live together, she said. Terry Gootee of the 5th Judicial District's Division of Community Corrections...