ATLANTA — Cohabitation is increasingly becoming the first co-residential union formed among young adults, a new study has found, but those who practice some facets of marriage without the foundation of commitment are harming their relationship.
“Over the past several decades, there have been large increases in the number of persons who have ever cohabited, that is, lived together with a sexual partner of the opposite sex,” said the study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, released March 2.
The data, collected in 2002, showed that the proportion of women in their late 30’s who had ever cohabited had doubled in 15 years, to 61 percent. Half of couples who cohabit marry within three years, the study said, but the likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by 6 percentage points if the couple had lived together first. Additionally a couple who lives together before getting engaged and married is 10 percentage points more likely to break up before their 10-year anniversary than is a married couple who didn’t cohabitate.
“Cohabitation is certainly a moral issue, but seeing it as a sociological and psychological issue as well reveals that cohabiting relationships tend — with all other things being equal — to be shorter-lived and more volatile than marriages because cohabitation is an ambiguous relationship,” said Glenn Stanton, director of family formation studies at Focus on the Family. (TAB)
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