Bryan ISTM you’re being needlessly combative on this, presumably because so much of what F-P posts is loony. But he’s right on this (as you appear to agree) – the universe of couples who get divorced is substantially populated by people who are unhappy in their marriages; the universe of people whose marriages end in death is populated with a lot of people who are happy in their marriage (as well as a lot of people who are unhappily trapped).
As to the thesis in the OP, it’s an interesting observation. The solution, of course, is to increase gender equality and economic security for all so that lock-in effects aren’t as severe. I’m not entirely sure you can call this a con of cohabitation though; I, for one, would consider any decision to marry without pre-matrimonial cohabitation irrational on its face.
The first thing about running experiments is that you have to understanding what you’re testing for. If we were testing for the effects of divorce, then it would make sense to consider what would happen in its absence. But that’s not what we’re testing for (and I don’t understand why you’re so hung up on this). We’re testing for the impact of cohabitation.
It’s nothing more than a “duh”, which makes your constant harping about it - since your very first post in this thread - rather puzzling.
Because divorce is essentially removed as a possibility? The gossip and bad reputation Indian women get from divorcing amongst their own community I’ve seen, and it’s nasty. And that’s just here in the States. And I must also beg to differ that your “mother has thoughtfully chosen a spouse for you…” sometimes, sure, but like any institution it’s ripe for abuse. Perhaps what mom thinks is good for you isn’t. Perhaps she thinks only to marry you off to a rich doctor, never minding if you are compatible in the long run or not.
I’m certainly not saying all arranged marriages are bad, but only that they don’t end in divorce because our culture doesn’t really allow for it without a great deal of trouble.
What really bothers me about your post - other people have already harped on the other things - is that I posted, you quoted the one word “agreed” and said “No.”
It was hard enough for me to break up with women anyway, I’d hate to think of how hard it would have been to break up if I lived with her regardless of which side of the breakup I was on.
Going into marriage I knew ‘breaking up’ was off the table, and I do thnk that makes a big difference in the stability of marriage. But I admit that’s just me/us and cohabitation apparently works fine for some people.
I think there’s several layers of correlation without causation here. Firstly, like others have said, people with religious or social backgrounds that frown on cohabitation also usually frown on divorce and/or put on a lot more social pressure to work things out or simply tough out a subpar relationship.
However, another issue is that if you don’t come from that background, your reasons for getting married are usually a lot different. Imagine the most basic form of cohabitatory relationship-- you both have jobs and roughly comparable independent incomes, no kids or any other complex financial obligations and you just split the bills down the middle. If you come from a religious background, you would probably feel the need to be married in the above situation, but if you’re not religious, there’s not really anything about the above situation that requires the legal protections of marriage. Those financial imbalances and entanglements are also a major source of relationship stress, however, and so not having them is going to result in a more harmonious relationship regardless of marital status. Plenty of people live in such cohabitory relationships for years and years without ever feeling the need to get married, but they don’t get counted in the article in the OP.
The correlation without causation comes in to play in the sense that the introduction of kids or financial burdens or one partner suddenly supporting the other are all reasons why secular people might feel the need to suddenly have the legal framework of marriage, but they also happen to add a whole lot more stress to a relationship. Sometimes marriage is even a reaction to a failing relationship, as one partner suddenly feels like an unequal partner and is no longer comfortable without the rights they will be afforded by marriage should the relationship come to an end.
To put it another way: if you have a couple who were just fine being not married, getting married is almost inevitably a reaction to some sort of stress being put on the relationship (even if it’s stress that both partners want to take on, such as having kids), so I think it’s unsurprising that cohabitory relationships that lead to marriage are more likely to lead to divorce. However, I do not share the conclusion that the same relationships would have fared any better had they gotten married prior to shacking up.
I don’t think people in happy marriages are getting divorced, but I think that increases in divorce rates are likely to be caused by factors other than “people are less happy in their marriages.”
I recently read Marriage and Divorce: Move-in before nuptials no longer predicts relationship’s longevity. It says couples which don’t live together or live together only after engagement have a 60% chance of the marriage lasting 15 years. There’s really no difference between the two. But if the couple is not engaged when they live together and later get married, then it’s only a 53% chance of making it to 15 years. So it’s worse to just live together, but not hugely worse.
Some of that might be correlated to the type of person. A person who doesn’t believe in living together will likely have different views on marriage than someone who doesn’t see a problem with living together. So it’s not “living together” that causes the difference. Rather, it’s more how someone feels about marriage which probably has some correlation to how they feel about living together.
But aren’t the first two sentences of your OP about how cohabitation leads to an increased rate of divorce? I’m not sure how you can base a thesis on “A leads to B” then later say B is irrelevant.
There’s nothing harpish in my questioning of your line of reasoning, nor is it the first time I’ve encountered such reasoning. Does the ease of (and disappearance of any social stigma attached to) cohabitation and divorce lend itself to a more casual attitude toward marriage? Yeah, probably. I’ve a hard time seeing an actual problem with this, though.
And even casual cohabitation has its exit costs… sure, I guess. At least as much as moving to a new residence, I suspect, with the natural hesitation to expend the effort to move out again until some threshold of dissatisfaction gets reached. The exit cost of divorce being even higher (though not nearly as high as it once was), that threshold is correspondingly higher.
The one issue I had with the OP was the concept of “consumer lock-in”. In my opinion, consumer lock-in is increased when one marries without cohabiting, so one can’t make the assumption that those that cohabit first only marry due to the lock in. It may be more accurate to say that those that don’t cohabit only stay married due to the lock in, which is probably a sense of social or religious obligation for couples that don’t cohabit. The correlation is still there and divorce is something to be avoided, but cohabitation is not the causative factor.
The first two sentences of the OP discusses statistical data which until recently was accurate. Cohabitation was correlated to higher divorce rates. This is independent of your stand on either cohabitation or divorce, and I’ve seen no evidence that F-P is dead set against either.
The post of yours which I made the joke about is really absurd. I can logically prove you are incorrect, but it mostly has already been done.
Now with the new data, showing that as cohabitation has become standard the divorce rates between cohabitors and non-cohabitors have converged make the selection explanation seem more reasonable.
I was disagreeing with your agreement. (I assumed incorrectly that Bryan was being facetious so I didn’t respond to him initially, but you seemed serious.)
B is relevant. But the possiblity that B is removed is not relevant. Because “B is not available” is not one of the options.
If I say:
Group A. B is available and is found 75% of the time.
Group Non-A. B is available and is found 25% of the time.
You would be justified in finding some correlation between A & B. And someone who carried on about what about “if B was not available” is wasting effort on a logical misunderstanding.
You’re comparing the exit costs of cohabitation to the exit costs of marriage. Of course, the latter are higher. But again, that not what is being compared, since we’re comparing marriages in both cases (whether with or without cohabitation).
The proper comparison is exit costs of cohabitation to the exit costs of relationships without cohabitation.
The dynamic works like this:
Put compatibility on a scale of 1 to 10. Suppose a person would not agree to marry a non-cohabitator unless they thought they were at least an 8. A person might be willing to cohabit without marriage if they thought they were at least a 7. Because cohabitation is less of a commitment than marriage. But now that they’re already cohabiting there’s a higher exit cost than before they moved in. And now the SO wants to get married. At this point, do you still hold out for an 8? It’s logical to assume that people would be willing to settle for a lower level, since they have the exit costs on the other side of the scale.
I raised the selection issue in the OP. Also the linked article mentioned it.
The article claims that recent studies have shown that selection does not account for all the discrepancy. Could be wrong. But in any event, it raised an interesting theory.
Well, assuming you’re referring to your rather tepid and lame lawyer joke, I admit curiosity how you’d prove that a marriage ending in divorce is worse than one ending in death. At best, you could point out the obvious that a couple getting a divorce didn’t want to be married any more, but if I can clarify the post that you label “absurd” (and, again, this is on the assumption that the joke you’re referring to is your lawyer one), I was speaking more generically in the sense of “worse for society” and I cheerfully admit that I was less than clear on this point.
Perhaps I’m a tad over-reactive in discussions seem to apply that marriage is something precious and special (i.e. it’s being hurt somehow, to society’s detriment, by the casual attitudes that come along with social acceptance of cohabitation) as I’ve seen similar arguments used in specious anti-SSM posts.
I think that generally, people who cohabitate are less committal and more likely to split when trouble arises. That said, I know lots of happy couples in long term marriages who lived together prior and many divorced couples who didn’t. Many different factors play a role, obviously.
I never had any issue with ditching a live in squeeze [with 1 exception, I had to literally move out and turn off the utilities to get him out of the apartment]
When I am the only name on the lease, and I move and do not invite you to move with me, it indicates you need to find your own place. Easy.
[I went through around 10 live in boy toys before I married my first husband, who lasted for 3 years and ended up abusive. I have been married to mrAru for 20 years now.]
The argument would be that to within epsilon every divorce involves someone being unhappy, while at least a reasonable number of marriages ending in death do not. Obviously not all - a counter example would be one spouse killing the other.
Now it is much less absurd given that you mean better for society. I think marriage is better, but that does not mean I think cohabitation is bad, because bad marriages are not good for society. And it precisely why I am for SSM.
We have rituals for a reason, and I think the marriage ritual, however it is done, is useful in advertising a significant change and forcing the couple to face a significant change.
Back when there was a significant difference, I wondered why it existed. My instincts are that cohabitation should help someone understand what they are looking for and what the pitfalls are, and thus increase the probability of marriage success. The incremental hypothesis sounds plausible. Anyhow, since my intuition is not very good in this area, I haven’t seen enough real data to have an opinion.
I wonder if they controlled for the length of the relationship prior to marriage. If cohabitators on average take four or five years before they exchange their vows, while non-cohabitors tend towards much shorter courtships, then you would expect the former to get divorced sooner than the latter. But only because their relationships are older and they were living together for a lot longer.