Posted on 06/29/2021 5:15:45 PM PDT by CharlesOConnell
"Mom, Joe and I have decided to live together," my strong-willed 23-year-old daughter announced defiantly at our dining-room table, her boyfriend at her side.
Her words made my heart pound and my stomach churn. "Have either of you even thought about the possibility you could get pregnant?"
My daughter looked sheepishly at her boyfriend, admitting they hadn't. The defiance swept over her face again and she replied, "Well, I don't care what you and Dad think. You'll just have to accept it."
"We may have to tolerate it," I said firmly. "But we'll never accept it. You're going, against every value taught you."
As she and her 24-year-old boyfriend marched out the door, I was heartbroken. It was one of the great sorrows of my life.
I couldn't convince my daughter that by entering a relationship of sex without marriage she could be making the worst mistake of her life. But since then I've learned unsettling facts about cohabitation. My hope is that what I learned will help other young people and parents facing the same situation. (The U.S. Census Bureau says 6,085,284 unmarried, opposite-sex partners live together. [Written in 1994]) Here's what I found:
Estimates from a number of experts are that 40 to 50 percent of cohabitants never marry each other. One 1985 Columbia University study found only 19 percent of men who lived with their girlfriends eventually walked down the aisle with them.
I also learned that in many live-in relationship differently, frequently the result of failing to discuss what they expect of each other. When 139 cohabiting students were asked why they lived with' somebody, most women said it was a first step toward marriage. For men, the most common motive was sex. One man, asked why he was living with his girlfriend, replied, "Sex-when you want it, where you want it Though that particular inquiry is now years old, and the fear of AIDS has changed attitudes toward sex, I found from the people I've talked to that many cohabitants still don't talk about what they expect from living together.
Many young couples today insist that living Together Is a good idea, the best way to see if they are compatible-and hence the best way to prevent divorce. The truth? One study found that people who live together before marriage are about 33 percent more likely to split up than those who don't. Another study showed that the longer they live together before marriage, the more likely they themselves thought their chance of divorce. Moreover, the study says, cohabitants have a lower reported quality of marriage and a lower commitment to it.
As Connecticut psychologist Joseph Nowinski explains, "Living together, while frequently touted as an intensely bold, romantic move, is often really a way to avoid full commitment. When two people opt for living together over marriage, one or both of them are often secretly saying, I'm worried my love for you is too fragile to last a lifetime, So I want a quick escape hatch if the going gets rough'. "
A broken heart can't be prevented just by refusing to sign on the dotted line. When live-in couples split, the emotional fallout is often as deeply painful as divorce. University of Southern California clinical psychologist Michael Newcomb explains: "Live-in couples usually become as emotionally attached as married couples. The problem is, it is easier for even a small problem to drive them apart because they just don't have the glue that married couples do to hold them together-such as kids, shared finances, a legal document."
Steve Jaccarino, a contractor in Westport, Conn., and his girlfriend broke up mainly because they disagreed over where they wanted to settle. Today, ten years later, Steve still imagines her coming back into his life. "I'm not over her," he says.
This was one of my deepest concerns. Five years before my daughter announced she was going to live with her boyfriend, she had made the same mistake. At age 18, she had run away from home to live with another boy-and bad gotten pregnant. When he deserted her, my daughter was so devastated and unable to cope that for years the burden of raising the baby had fallen on my husband's and my shoulders.
When another young woman I know of lived with a man, she accidentally got pregnant with twins. Her live-in lover stayed with her until she was seven months along and jobless, then phoned her parents one night and announced, "Come and get your very pregnant daughter." For the next 18 years, she raised her twin boys alone, often barely able to buy food or pay rent. Fully 44 percent of unwed mothers will live in poverty.
Frequently, people who live together first are miserable after marriage. Common problems include: lower overall ability to communicate-less ability to resolve quarrels. In one study, wives who' cohabited before the wedding complained especially about the poor quality of communication with their mates. Clearly, when it comes to marriage, practicing beforehand doesn't make perfect. On the contrary, in a study reported in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, the longer couples had lived together before marriage, the more unhappy they were.
A 1989 study found physical attacks are more common and more severe among live-in couples than among those who are married. Isolation from their families may be a reason for this, the study's authors concluded.
Another survey showed a startling 40 per cent of cohabiting women were forced to endure a kind of sex they disliked. Moreover, since there is often no commitment to be sexually exclusive, those who cohabit may be put at a higher-than-average risk for sexually transmitted diseases such as genital herpes, chlamydia and AIDS.
At age 19, one Palm Springs, California woman offered to let her unemployed boyfriend-move in with her. She recalls: "He was living with his ex-girlfriend at the time. I figured if he moved in with me, he'd be all mine. Instead, I wound up doing all the work and paying all the bills while he was secretly sleeping with her in my bed. It was a bad mistake."
Cohabiting is often portrayed as trouble-free and offering all the joys of marriage with none of the responsibilities. Nonsense!
One young man I know attests to the falsity of this argument. He moved in with his fiancee three months before their wedding. Today he says, "We had all the disagreements of marriage Who does the dishes? Who pays the bills?-without the commitment to hold us together. If we had lived together longer, we might have broken up. When you aren't married and you fight, you don't ever have to work it out if you don't want to. You can just walk away."
Frequently, the woman sees living together as romantic, while the man views the arrangement as a "practical" solution that will help them iron out differences and strengthen their love by destroying any foolish romantic fantasies they may have about each other. In fact, live-in couples may find it harder to build lasting love precisely because they have lost their starry-eyed, romantic "illusions."
Family therapists Judy and Jim Sellner, authors of Loving for Life, say that rich, lasting love goes through several distinct stages. The first is the "romantic" phase when love is wild and idealistic, when couples believe they have found their "one true love" with whom they will "live happily ever after."
It is an absolutely wonderful time, and couples should linger over it and just enjoy the candlelight dinners, the swooning, the craziness of it all. Cutting it short to rush into living together could be a major mistake. Say the Sellners: Couples who weather the tumultuous power-struggle and conflict stages and sail smoothly on to a more peaceful period in which they understand and handle their differences are those whom manage to recall the "overly idealized" visions of each other they enjoyed in the first romantic stage of courtship.
The day my daughter said she was moving in with her boyfriend, I knew some of these facts and shared them with her-to no avail. But over the past few years, as I continued to learn about the data on living together, I was even more convinced it was the wrong thing to do. I became so determined to get this information out to people-and to help young women and men avoid or cope with the pregnancies that all too often result from living together-that I started a support group for unwed parents, which advocates premarital abstinence. My daughter, now 35 and much wiser, is active in the organization and tells anyone who will listen that living together is absolutely the wrong way to go.
As our children become young adults, we can no longer make decisions for them. Nor can we completely keep them from harm. But at least we can arm them with all the facts we can find. We can then only pray they'll make the right choices.
I said marriage today isn’t biblical marriage. And that is true. Men have no rights or benefits in marriage anymore. He’s not the head of the house anymore. The kids aren’t his and can be taken away at any time, divorce can occur for any reason including “I’m unhappy” or “I’m bored”, family court is heavily biased in favor of women, half of marriages end in divorce including christian marriages so there’s no guarantee there, and 80% of women file for divorce, almost everywhere its no-fault divorce, so women sure feel no responsibility to keep their wedding vows of “through better or worse, richer or poorer”. Not when 4 out of 5 divorces are initiated by women.
You never even offered one logical statement why what I said isn’t true.
You just turned into an angry, self-righteous filthmouth.
And everyone can see you’ve failed terribly.
Except there really is no such thing as ‘no fault’ divorce.
A better word for it is ‘unilateral divorce’. One side decide that they are gone and it is done. The divorces are just as bitter and vicious as there are money and children to fight over.
A better ready for the dad to look at this.
They have ‘gotten married’ in Gods eyes.
When they take each other, they are married. But they are somewhat outside of the crazy marriage and divorce laws that we have.
So there is no ridiculous wedding.
No nasty divorce. When they want to split up, they do. Minimal government interference.
Except - well, the government will get their fingers into the broke up couple if there are any children to fight over.
That is true.
Why do women initiate most of the divorces?
Because they have high confidence of obtaining the kids abs a substantial part of his income.
Doesn’t always work out for them.
In the 80’s, NOW and the Government issued reports on all the courts State by State. They managed to claim that women were getting the short end of the stick in divorce court, despite getting custody in the vast majority of cases (90%).
To achieve this end, they just narrowed down their cases to less than 1% of the total - and claimed that men got custody in to ISD 2/3 of the time. A complete crock !
it works out almost all of the time in their favor.
Thats why they file at the rate they file.
Thats why the very few times it doesn’t, its a big news story, and massive news story if its a celebrity woman.
Note this is also where women don’t think the lesser earner should get alimony or a 50-50 split of resources. Only when women benefit are they for alimony and 50-50 splits. and child support, aka alimony 2, 3,....
I don’t agree to anything.
Laws may be unfair -- I'm not arguing that part. Biblical marriage is about the man loving the woman like Christ loves the church, and the woman obeying the husband. They should have many children if so blessed, and the children are to be brought up in a strict way knowing and loving the truth of God. The above has never been easy, but it's not dependent on laws.
You never talk about yourself. Everyone can see that. Okay, so you suck at life. But it doesn't mean other people do.
You want a prize?
It was an honest question. You invited it, and you are the one evading responding.
I can’t help but wonder what a man who has rejected women and marriage does about sex.
You built up a straw man to argue against.
You have no idea who I am. But you build up something in your mind so that it makes it easy to dismiss what is being said. And you’ve done that all throughout this thread.
And to be fair, I don’t know you, or anyone else here. Most people here do not know who is on the other end of the screen name.
It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t argue personalities, i argue about ideas and topics and facts and reality. everyone posting here has a right to speak about anything, except per Jim’s caucus safe spaces, there’s no criteria that must be met in order to weigh in on a topic. Your personal experience has no bearing regarding someone talking about statistical data results. Mine doesn’t either. When we talk societal patterns and biases it doesn’t matter what race I am, or what gender you are.
Your premise I’m not happy or successful or whatever because I don’t talk about myself is laughable and ridiculous. It has no bearing on why I make a case for or against something. Formyou to assume the things you do is unintelligent and again, you attempt to make up a strawman you can then go and argue against.
Put it this way, I don’t care who you are. If I think you’re right I will agree with you. If I don’t I will disagree with you. Me agreeing with you or disagreeing with you has nothing to do with if I know you personally, or know more about you. If I believe you’re right, I agree. It’s not predicated on anything other than that. Its why I have disagreed with someone on one topic thread, and then a few threads later on something else, we’re in agreement.
I reread my post, post 54, you responded to with that question, and I wrote nothing to invite that type of question.
That post was discussing spouses abandoning a severely ill/dying spouse when they became ill.
My answer to your wondering is simple. Google it. You will find quite a bit of information out there to browse on that topic. You will wonder no longer.
Many times I have heard men I barely know complain that their wife changed completely with marriage. No idea why they would complain to me.
“The big question is: Did she ever come back?”
Did you read it all the way through? Author says at the end that daughter is now 35 and realizes the errors of her ways.
Kind of like Mr. Darcy for the womenfolk.
In 30 years, 3 headaches.
I wonder if these men cohabited with their girlfriends before marrying them.
“My thinking is when you live together, you are more willing to compromise since it is short term.”
Right-o. I think there’s a lot of that, particularly on the women’s side. This is anecdotal, I know, but a woman I’m acquainted with has been desperately pursuing a loser-ish sorta fellow for the past half dozen years. Around the dawn of covid, loser guy lost his job, so he moved in with her to save expenses. After a few months, she’s knocked up, thus fulfilling her long-term goal of becoming a mom. Baby was born a few months ago, but no wedding, no ring, no plans. It’s almost nauseating the extent that this gal kisses her boyfriend’s rear end, constantly lavishing praise on what a great dad he is, what a great cook he is, what a great “partner” he is. So if there’s any dispute between the two, is she willing to compromise? Damned right she is. She’s not about to do anything that might cause the guy to walk. Now imagine that they were married, and suddenly it’s not so simple for the guy to walk when you’re talking about divorce and asset division and child support and custody hearings, etc. Would she be willing to kiss the dude’s ass to the extent that she is doing now?
Yes I do. Send me a Thompson Chain reference KJV, a Schofield reference Bible, a Ryrie study Bible. Dispensational truth by Clarence Larkin. Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. A thousand Navigator’s bridge tracts, all Hal Lindsey’s books. All the Genesis 6 (Nephilim) stuff by Chuck Missler, Trey Smith, Allen Nolan, LA Marzuli, and Amir Tsarfati’s books.
I am into Biblical marriage. I certainly don’t groove on the family law thing. I got my born again Christian wife, out of a third world country, where she often times, didn’t get enough to eat. She appreciated what I did for her, and told me she hated being hungry. Believe it or not, there are Christian women in that third world country, which will remain unnamed. She gave me a son, who is now a US Air Force flying officer. I will never, however, ask anyone, especially a stranger, about their sex life. If you want to, fine. I never will. I don’t think that is Biblical. Don’t take it personally, if someone does not have a Biblical opinion on anything. It’s your job to tell them the truth, and the Holy Spirit’s job to convict them of sin, and righteousness and judgment. See you here, there, or in the air, at the rapture. (Harpazo)
Yes the men I’m talking about were complaining about how different a live in was from a wife. They were resentful that the wedding changed everything. I speculate that their wives stopped auditioning and started living.
By the way, I forgot to mention, to be fair. I have seen more than a few women get screwed over too. One of my co workers had 4 young children. One day, her useless, piece of garbage husband, up and left her and the kids, and promptly disappeared. To this day, she doesn’t know if he is dead or alive. He was a piece of garbage.
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