Term Paper on
Cohabitation and Marriage
When two people live together without first getting married, such an arrangement
is referred to as "cohabitation." In United States of America, it is now more
common than ever. The number of cohabiting couples has escalated to 4.2 million
in 1998, from just over half a million in 1970 (Statistical Abstract, 1990).
Today, over 50 percent of marriages are preceded by cohabitation. (Popenoe &
Whitehead, 1999)
Most cohabitation does not last long; they normally last for a little more than
a year and then they either transform into marriages or dissolve. Many observers
believed that the United States would follow the path paved by the Nordic
countries toward a future of informal but stable relationships; but this has not
happened. There has been no sign of cohabitation becoming a durable substitute
to marriage in the U.S. It has remained a phase of the courtship process or a
temporary convenience, but not a stable social arrangement. Therefore, by
resembling marriage in some ways and differing from it in others, cohabitation
brings some but not all of the overheads and benefits of marriage.
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Cohabitation vs. Marriage
Cohabitation is a provisional, non-legal “co-residential” union. It does not
guarantee a lifetime obligation to stay together. Even if one partner
anticipates the relationship to be permanent, the other partner often does not.
These unions usually break up at a much higher rate than marriages. Cohabiting
partners have no responsibility to financially support each other and most are
not willing to share financial resources. Cohabiting couples value separate
leisure activities and keep their social lives independent. Most cohabiters
expect their relationship to be sexually exclusive. But research has revealed
that these couples are much less likely to be monogamous than married couples.
A considerable percentage of cohabiting couples have definite plans to marry,
and these couples tend to behave like already-married couples. Others have no
plans to marry and cohabitation agreements rather than marriage laws bind these
provisional and uncommitted relationships. In fact, many couples choose
cohabitation exactly because it carries no formal restrictions or
responsibilities.
Although cohabitation is becoming very prevalent, several studies have confirmed
that cohabitants do not fare as well as married couples. The provisional,
temporary, and socially unsupported nature of cohabitation hinders the ability
of this type of partnership to deliver many of the benefits of marriage. (BrOwn
& Booth, 1996) The comparatively separate lives normally pursued by cohabiting
partners also deter couples to enjoy the benefits of married life. The doubt
about the permanence and prolonged existence of the relationship makes
investment in the relationship much riskier than in marriage. Couples who stay
together for a long period develop some skills and let others atrophy because
they can count on their spouse to fill in where they are feeble. This means that
couples working together in a long-term partnership produce more than the same
people do working alone. Cohabitation reduces the benefits and increases the
costs of a long-term partnership. Cohabitating couples feel that it is much
safer to do everything for themselves since they don't know whether the partner
they are living with now will be around next year. Therefore, cohabitating
couples typically produce less than married couples.
The impermanent and informal nature of cohabitation also makes it more difficult
and riskier for families to invest in and support the relationship. Parents,
siblings, friends of the partners are less likely to be willing to accept the
notion of a cohabiting partner than a spouse. More importantly, they would be
less likely to fit in a person who is outside "the family" into its ceremonies,
activities, and financial dealings. Parents of one member of a cohabiting couple
are ill advised to invest in the partner emotionally or financially until they
see if the relationship will be long term. They are also ill advised to attach
to children of their child's cohabiting partner because their "grandparent"
relationship with that child will dissolve if the cohabitation splits up.
Marriage and plans to marry make that long-term commitment explicit and reduce
the risk to families of incorporating the son- or daughter-in-law and
stepchildren. The separateness of cohabiters' lives also reduces their
helpfulness as a source of support during difficult times. Kara Joyner and Julie
Brines in an article have argued that cohabiters are inclined to expect each
person to be responsible for supporting him or herself, and failure to do so
disrupts the relationship.
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Another downside of cohabitation is that it distances people from some vital
social institutions, especially organized religion. (Thornton & Axinn, 1992)
Most religions condemn and discourage cohabitation, making association with
religious communities uncomfortable for unmarried couples. The result is that
individuals who enter cohabitation often reduce their participation in religious
activities. On the contrary, people who get married and those who become parents
generally become more active. Thus, while men and women who define themselves as
"religious" are less likely to cohabit, those who do cohabit consequently become
less religious.
Cohabitation has become progressively more important, but poorly described,
context for child rearing. Almost a quarter of existing stepfamilies comprise of
cohabiting couples, and a major proportion of "single-parent" families are
actually two-parent cohabiting families. The parenting responsibility of a
cohabiting partner toward the children of the other person is extremely
indistinctly defined. The non-parent partner has no unambiguous financial,
legal, supervisory, or custodial rights or responsibilities regarding the child
of his partner. This vagueness and lack of enforceable claims by either
cohabiting partner or child makes involvement in the relationship dangerous for
both partners.
What Cohabitation "Produces"
Although cohabitation is becoming very prevalent, several studies have
established that cohabitants do not fare as well as married people. Consider the
following:
Domestic Violence
A recent Census Bureau report demonstrates that many women avoid getting married
because of domestic violence and child abuse. An analysis of data from the
1987/88 National Survey of Families and Households shows that cohabiting couples
are twice as likely as married couples to say that disagreements between them
and their partner had become physical in the previous year (16 percent of
cohabiting women compared to eight percent of married women). When it comes to
"hitting, throwing things, and shoving", cohabitating couples are more than
three times more likely than the married to say things get that far out of hand.
One reason why cohabiters are more aggressive is that they are, on average,
younger and less educated. But even after neglecting factors like education,
age, race, and gender, people who live together are 1.8 times more likely to
report violent arguments than married people.
However, it matters a great deal whether cohabitating couples have any plans to
marry. Usually, engaged cohabiters report violence no more than married couples.
Cohabitates with no plans to marry are twice as likely to report couple violence
as either engaged or married couples. Women involved in uncommitted cohabiting
relationships are at a higher risk of violence directed toward them. The safety
of married and engaged cohabiting couples is considerably higher on this
dimension than uncommitted cohabiting couples.
Sex
Sex is probably the key element of the cohabiting relationships. Cohabiting men
and women make love on average between seven and seven and a half times a month,
or about one extra sex act a month than married people. (Froste & Tanfer, 1996)
But cohabiting women and men are less likely to be monogamous than those who are
married, although almost all say that they expect their relationship to be
sexually exclusive. Renata Forste and Koray Tanfer demonstrated in the National
Survey of Women that four percent of married women had a secondary sex partner
compared to 20 percent of cohabiting women and 18 percent of dating women.
Women's behavior changed dramatically when they married, with a huge decline in
the chances of having a secondary sex partner. Forste and Tanfer conclude that
marriage itself increases sexual exclusivity.
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Emotional Well-Being
Married people consider their relationship to be much more stable than
cohabiting couples do. This is because by design and agreement, marriage is for
the long run. For any couple, thinking that the relationship is likely to break
up has a dampening effect on the feelings. The result is that cohabitates show
lower psychological well-being than similar married people. Cohabitates report
being more depressed and less satisfied with life than do married people. Susan
Brown (1996), a psychologist, states in her study that concern about the
stability of one's relationship is especially distressing for cohabitating women
with children, who show quite high levels of depression as a result.
It has been speculated that cohabitating people are more depressed because
dissatisfied and depressed people have trouble getting married. However, Brown
does not agree with this speculation. She states that their scores before the
start of the relationship do not explain cohabitates’ higher levels of
depression. Rather it is a person's observation of the chances that the
relationship will break up that seems to be the chief cause in his or her poor
emotional well being.
Divorce
People often believe that living together in a "trial marriage" will give
potential partners a taste of the real thing. They believe that the information
gained could help them make good choices and avoid bad ones and cohabiting
before marriage could lead to better their marriage later. Evidence from the
National Survey of Families and Households shows how widespread this belief is.
Most cohabitates say that making sure that they are compatible before marriage
is an important reason that they wanted to live together.
However, a large body of recent evidence shows quite consistently that people
who cohabit and then marry are much more likely to divorce than people who marry
without living together. An initial inference might be that cohabitation changes
people's attitudes so that they become less dedicated to the institution of
marriage. However, research conducted by Lee Lillard and Michael Brien shows
that people who cohabit have other qualities that both lead them to cohabit in
the first place and make them poor marriage material. Thus, in the case of
divorce, selection would seem to account for the differences between marriage
and cohabitation.
Conclusion
The collective evidence clearly advocates that compared to marriage, uncommitted
cohabitation is a substandard social arrangement. Couples who live together with
no definite plans to marry make a different deal than married couples or engaged
cohabitates. The deal is very different from marriage. It is only
"marriage-like" in the sense that couples share an active sex life and a house
or apartment. Cohabiting men often tend to be more uncommitted to the
relationship; cohabiting women with children tend to be quite uncertain about
its future. Levels of domestic violence are much higher in cohabitating couples
than in either married or engaged cohabiting couples. Children in families
headed by an unmarried couple do much worse than children in families with
married parents. Uncommitted cohabitation delivers relatively few benefits to
men, women, or children. This social arrangement also damages the relationships
and benefits of communities.
Works Cited
Statistical Abstract of the United States 1990, Table No. 54, and Statistical
Abstract of the United States 1999, Table No. 68.
Popenoe, David and Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe, "Should We Live Together? What
Young Couples Need to Know about Cohabitation Before Marriage" (New Brunswick:
National Marriage Project, 1999), p. 3.
Brown, Susan L. and Booth, Alan, "Cohabitation Versus Marriage: A Comparison of
Relationship Quality," Journal of Marriage and the Family 58 (August 1996):
668-678.
Thornton, Arland, Axinn, William G., et al., "Reciprocal Effects of Religiosity,
Cohabitation and Marriage," American Journal of Sociology 98 (November 1992):
628-651.
Forste, Renata and Tanfer, Koray, "Sexual Exclusivity Among Dating, Cohabiting,
and Married Women," Journal of Marriage and the Family 58 (February 1996):
33-47.
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