FIRST-PERSON: The truth about cohabitation

Baptist Press ^ | Jan 9, 2007 | Ed Litton

[GladesGuru]

Numerous studies confirm this particular one.

In a theological sense, that G*d thought enough of the issue to issue a commandment, it can be said to have already been studied at the highest level.

Ironic that soft science PhD's confirm the most basic element of Judeo-Christian life, as well as one of the Commandments. Publishing that result must have deeply distressed their little Marxist egos.

[Candor7]

My obserevation of such long term cohabitation is that the female of the couple gets quite frustrated and worn, and leaves while her biological clock is still ticking, to find a real man who wants to start a marriage and a family.

Cohab is extended rehab of men who cannot grow up, and it almost always fails.

[ravinson]

The study is on the Alabama Policy Institute website. Here are some revealing aspects of it:

This study uses data from the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), which was conducted by the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin between March 1987 and May 1988. Since previous research suggests the effects of cohabitation on marital stability are limited to the first 10 years of marriage, data from only the first wave were chosen to acquire the largest number of participants who had been married the shortest amount of time.

That's pretty much ancient history.

[ravinson]

Here's another interesting finding from the API study: The couples who cohabitated had more sex by a large margin -- much larger than any other differences measured except conflict and depression.

It appears that what the study may have found is that people in the group studied who were more emotional/volatile tended to cohabitate before marriage -- perhaps because they were more cautious about commitments or perhaps because they had parents whose volitility led to divorce and/or marital discord. Moreover, by eliminating every cohabitating couple who stayed married more than 10 years, they eliminated a huge percentage of the happily married cohabitators.

[Intolerant in NJ]

The results are eye-opening. The study shows that the longer a couple cohabits before marriage, the less satisfied they are with their marriage...not really so eye-opening - one of the few consistent findings in all of the social sciences has been in a number of studies showing that there is less success in marriage, however measured, for those who cohabited before than for those who didn't......