In my experience, people who don’t live together first are responding to religious ideals. Those people, in my experience, also tend to stay married to each other even if they hate each others guts, for religious reasons. I don’t think it makes for a better marriage; just one that is less likely to end in divorce.
I have been married twice. I lived with neither husband prior to marriage, so our pre-marriage living conditions were identical. One marriage ended in divorce, so in my case, it did not have an effect.
I approach it from a different perspective. To me, how someone acts at 6 am is not a deal-breaker. I realize this example is used as a shorthand for larger issues, but I still stand by my belief that you do not need to test-drive someone to find out if you can live with them. To me, committed people who have issues with the picayune behaviors of the other do one of two things: either the person doing the thing stops (out of consideration of the other) or the other one accepts it. Sometimes, depending on the issue, a third compromise option can be reached.
I don’t think living together is the salient point – the crux of the matter is how committed you are to the idea of marriage in the first place. If you view it just as extended living together then heck, move right in and if it feels right, get married.
But if you believe, as I do, that it’s an important union between two people, that it’s a committment to one another so deep that you’re willing to say, publicly, I want to love, support and be with this person for the rest of my life, it’s important enough to support by removing it from the realm of convenient shacking up and place it on a separate, more important plane.
This is of course my opinion, and I realize not all people think the same as me. I don’t hold it against anyone who wants to live together; after all, despite my old-fashioned views, I did indeed divorce my first husband.
My husband and I have lived together almost since the first day. We have been together 13 years, married for 7. It wasn’t the paper that has kept us together, or the fact that we kicked the tires for almost 6 years before we married, or the fact that we didn’t have a child until we had been married for 5 years.
It’s because no matter what stinkin’ pile of crap we have gotten ourselves into individually, we together are the only ones that can get US out of it. There have been some amazingly stupid decisions made that have had severe impacts on our lives. However, the one thing they have in common, besides being stupid, is that those were decisions we made without the consult of the other. United we stand.
I say this after I got the call that my husband had to go make the last repayment plan payment on our mortgage, getting our house out of danger of foreclosure for the first time in 3 years. After a lengthy call about someone I had an emotional affair with who is borderline stalking me, as we approach my husbands 2 years of sobriety date and one day before we get a second car that we haven’t had since we sold his truck to save our house.
Shackin’ up? Ain’t got nothing to do with it. Committment does. Perseverance does. Flexibility does. Love? Yeah, it is there, but sometimes, that just ain’t enough.
Now excuse me, I’m going to go wake up my daughter. We looked at her baby pictures last night and I just want to hug her all day. (easier said than done with a 2 year old)
What about lesbian/gay couples who are (sadly, imo) prohibited to marry? I’ve only known a couple of couples, so my sample is small. But they do seem to have similar problems and rewards in cohabiting. Plus, of course, some added pressure from a sometimes negative society. I couldn’t find any stats on the few who were allowed to wed for that brief period in San Francisco.
To clear up what I mean by successful:
A successful relationship would be one in which both parties wish to remain a couple.
We didn’t live together, but solely for the practical reason that we never lived closer than 600 miles from each other, and quite a bit further than that when we were engaged. However we had known each other for 5 1/2 years before getting engaged, had not spoken to each other for some part of that time, and in general gave ourselves plenty of opportunity for it not to work before we got married. After 30 years I think you could call it successful. I have no objection to people living together, and I think it helps if they have a crisis during that time to see how the other responds. My daughter and her boyfriend have lived together for quite some time (she’s the one who doesn’t want to get married) and seeing how he handled stuff makes me a lot more confident in him for the long term.
I cannot recall who said this, but it was something along the lines of, “Don’t marry anyone until you’ve seen that person with the flu.” I took that to mean, know the good and bad about the person, know what he or she is like under adverse circumstances, and know how ugly and gross another person can be at times. Then if you still want to marry him/her, go ahead.
Not bad advice, IMO.
The revelation for me was the first time I kept her company while she did a “#2”. :eek:
I loved her anyway.
Love is, indeed, blind. “blind” being a metaphor.
BTW; We are ex’s now. Couldn’t weather other storms.