AUGUST 19, 2008

Cohabitation Wars!

It’s obvious that times are changing– in many ways.  Too many to count, actually.  I know this makes me sound old, but I was born in the 80s, so I’m not that old…yet. 

One thing that I’ve always been fascinated with is people’s strong opinions about cohabitation by couples before marriage (this reminds me a bit of the stay-at-home mom vs. the working mom debate).  Most people I know find themselves leaning strongly towards one end of the spectrum or the other– for varying reasons.  Some think that it’s never appropriate for a couple to live together until marriage; others feel that if it makes sense financially and personally, they should go for it to “test out” the relationship before they leap into something a lot more serious. 

This doesn’t even take into account the barrage of images of celebrity couples (think Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt) who are choosing to live together before marriage and even start families with no feelings of obligation to wed.  The public may start thinking, if they can do it… why can’t I? 

A July USA Today article called “Living Together Isn’t Just ‘Playing House’ ” really delves into the issue and explains why living together no longer has the negative associations and stereotypes attached to it that it did in days of the past.  According to the article, the number of opposite-sex couples who live together has jumped from less than 1 million 30 years ago to 6.4 million in 2007. 

According to Jay Teachman, a sociology professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, while old data showed an increased risk of divorce among cohabiting couples, that’s not necessarily true today:

Twenty or 25 years ago, if you were cohabiting and then married them, the marriage was more likely to dissolve and end in divorce…today that’s not the case.  You can cohabit with your spouse and not experience increased risk of divorce.  We’re making these finer distinctions that we didn’t make before.

I personally feel that cohabitation before marriage can be a good thing.  For me, it in part came down to a financial decision.  After I got engaged I realized it was pointless to keep my apartment because I was spending all of my free time at my fiance’s house.  Why continue to pay rent when I knew we’d be living together in a matter of months, anyway? 

My mom wasn’t exactly thrilled about this… but she got over it after she did the math and realized it would only be two months of living together before the date of our wedding.  She raised me with the mindset that cohabitation before marriage is a very bad thing.  Now that I am older and have formed opinions of my own, I stand somewhere in the middle of the cohabitation wars: I appreciate the idea in certain circumstances, but I also respect the perspective of my mother.

What do you think?  Is cohabitation less of a big deal today than it was in the past?  Does the new evidence make you think any differently about the concept?