Dr. Phil is ruining my life.
His reels keep showing up on my Facebook feed. Upon which I waste far too much time. I have been particularly fascinated by the episodes featuring clearly incompatible engaged couples. And I yell “Just break up! Don’t get married! Run!!!”
And then I learn they have three kids together. And a house, a dog and probably a side business. So, leaving is no longer an easy option.
I’ve previously written about the low divorce rate among couples who save sex for marriage. Now I want to take it one step further and talk about the impact of premarital cohabitation on marriages.
Spoiler alert: it is not good. Couples who cohabit before marriage report both higher divorce rates and, for those who stay together, lower levels of overall marital satisfaction.
We need to begin with the caveat that not every couple who cohabitates before marriage is going to end up divorced or unhappy. Heck, some of my favorite couples lived together before they were married. These days, it seems like nearly every couple does. And the consequences may not be dire in every relationship. But the overall trends are not good.
Why?
Stanley Scott, who has studied the effects of premarital cohabitation extensively, summarizes the problem succinctly. He says that cohabiting couples often wind up “sliding, not deciding.” In other words, they move to the “next step” not because they have made a deliberate, calculated, prayerful decision, but rather because they have built too many barriers to exit, and thus it’s easier to move forward than to try to disentangle themselves.
One of the most important decisions most people make is the choice of a marriage partner. This is the person who will wake and sleep next to them for the rest of their lives, who will parent and form their children, who will know them and whom they will know more intimately than anyone. That decision will color every aspect of the rest of their lives.
So naturally, it is a decision that needs to be made objectively, with great care and forethought. When someone is contemplating marriage, they need to weigh the alternatives carefully, and to pray for guidance.
Even in the best of circumstances, it can be difficult to be objective — to recognize incompatibility or red flags in a relationship — when we have strong feelings for someone. I remember once breaking up with someone I cared about, and I literally had nightmares for a month. But we were neither living nor sleeping together, which gave me the objectivity to recognize that we were not a good match.
How much more complicated would it have been if our lives had been more deeply intertwined, if we had followed the modern script? For so many couples, this is how it goes: First, they start leaving things at each other’s places. Then they realize it would be much more cost effective to move in together. They probably haven’t really thought much about “is this the person I want to spend the rest of my life with?” In fact, they may figure that living together will help them “test” whether marriage would be a good idea.
Meanwhile, they have combined their households. They share an address. They pool their money. Eventually they want nicer stuff, so they buy some furniture together. They get a dog, because dogs are cute. They may buy a house together, because everybody knows that buying makes more sense than renting. And often, they wind up with a kid or two, because rates of pregnancy increase among cohabitating couples.
Each of these steps creates a barrier to leaving. If they break up, they’ll have to give up their home, perhaps even sell it, and find a new place to live. They’ll have to separate the money and fight over custody of the sofa and the dog and perhaps even the kids. It becomes a lot easier to just go with the flow. Couples marry, not because they have done the work separately and reached the objective conclusion that they are called to join their lives together, but rather because marriage is the next stop on the train, and exiting would be too complicated at this point. It would essentially be a divorce without the legal protections.
And so, they wind up married to someone they perhaps wouldn’t otherwise have chosen. And they often find lower levels of marital satisfaction and a higher divorce rate.
For these and many other reasons, the church always discouraged premarital cohabitation. It’s not prudery. It’s just an understanding of human nature, along with a profound respect for the institution of marriage, and for the reality that as marriage goes, so goes society. And that marriage goes much better when the marriage decision is made carefully and deliberately.
Marriage proposals should come from a place of deep love and commitment, not convenience, pressure or necessity.
When it comes to choosing a spouse, please make sure you are truly deciding, and not just sliding.
Bonacci is a syndicated columnist based in Denver.
