Seven years – but who’s counting?

Some time ago, we were chatting with a man in his late twenties. He had been living with his girlfriend for some years, and she was restless: she wanted a commitment to marriage and family. After seven years together, he was still uncertain.

In previous eras, the courtship sequence was simple: when a person was ready to marry, they entered the ‘marriage market’. If they met a prospective partner, the two dated, and all being well, a proposal would be made, and marriage would follow.

Partners had only one critical decision to make: is this person the right person with whom to form a family? There were no questions like: Am I ready? Is he/she ready? Because, if they weren’t yet ready to marry, they didn’t enter the ‘marriage market’.

Delayed Marriage

Things are different now. As marriage is increasingly delayed to the late twenties and thirties, for most singles there is a decade or more of forming and dissolving romantic partnerships.

Some are in the marriage market: they’re ready to marry and put down permanent roots. For others, marriage is not on their horizon, and they’re in a dating market, not a marriage one.

The problem is that many singles form romantic partnerships without understanding that their partner is in a different market. The courtship process starts, but the timetable and destination for each partner is not aligned.

Semi-permanent arrangements like cohabitation tend to delay the important discussions that would bring these differences to light. Moreover, cohabitation itself is often perceived differently by each partner.

For example, one partner might see cohabitation as a progression towards engagement and marriage. The other might see it as a convenient way to save on living expenses with no assumptions about a long-term relationship.

Even if they both start the relationship from the dating market, one may transition to the marriage market before the other. Aka, our friend above.

When their relationship began as nineteen-year-old university students, neither was thinking about marriage. Seven years later, she had moved into the marriage market while he was still very much in the dating one.

Seven years is a long time to be discerning, and she was right to want clarity on their future. If family is part of her life goals, a woman doesn’t have the reproductive luxury to delay marriage.

Unwelcome reality

In our age, cohabitation before marriage is seen as a sensible way to ensure compatibility and divorce-proof the relationship. It’s regularly justified with the car analogy: you wouldn’t buy a car without test driving it first.

But does cohabitation effectively mitigate the risks of future divorce? Does ‘test driving’ marriage ensure compatibility and marital longevity?

The research data is unequivocal: cohabitation increases the risk of breakdown of a future marriage. That wasn’t a typo. Cohabitation makes divorce more likely, not less.

The problem with the car analogy is, we’re talking about people, not inanimate objects. A car won’t have a broken heart if you commit to a different one. But your partner of seven years sure will.

And that might give us a clue as to why prior cohabitation generally hurts rather than helps a marriage. Cohabitation is basically putting our partner to the test.

Even if he or she ‘passes’ and we go on to marry, there’s a residual doubt – a lingering wound of threatened rejection – that sits uncomfortably in the background. The conditional commitment of cohabitation is a shaky foundation for a marriage.

What continues to perplex us, is how resistant the cohabitation myth is to facts and rationality. Despite numerous studies showing that cohabitation increases the likelihood that a future marriage will end in divorce, many couples believe the opposite.

Or insist that even if it’s true generally, it doesn’t apply to them. Or that their circumstances nullify the risks.

We don’t doubt that the cohabitating couple in our story sincerely believed they were acting for the good of their relationship. The problem was their decision was made without full or accurate information of the risks involved.