Infatuation Rules
Infatuation Rules
Photo: SHVETS production
Late last month, the Journal of Marriage and Family published a new study with a somewhat foreboding finding: Couples who lived together before marriage had a lower divorce rate in their first year of marriage, but had a higher divorce rate after five years.
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Read More »Late last month, the Journal of Marriage and Family published a new study with a somewhat foreboding finding: Couples who lived together before marriage had a lower divorce rate in their first year of marriage, but had a higher divorce rate after five years. It supported earlier research linking premarital cohabitation to increased risk of divorce. But just two weeks later, the Council on Contemporary Families—a nonprofit group at the University of Texas at Austin—published a report that came to the exact opposite conclusion: Premarital cohabitation seemed to make couples less likely to divorce. From the 1950s through 1970, “those who were willing to transgress strong social norms to cohabit … were also more likely to transgress similar social norms about divorce,” wrote the author, Arielle Kuperberg, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. But as the rate of premarital cohabitation ballooned to some 70 percent, “its association with divorce faded. In fact, since 2000, premarital cohabitation has actually been associated with a lower rate of divorce, once factors such as religiosity, education, and age at co-residence are accounted for.” It’s not unheard-of for contemporaneous studies on the same topic to reach opposite conclusions, but it’s somewhat surprising for them to do so after analyzing so much of the same data. Both studies analyzed several cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth, a longitudinal data set of women (and men, starting in 2002) between the ages of 15 and 44, though Kuperberg’s study incorporates some data from another survey as well. And, this isn’t the first time researchers have come to differing conclusions about the implications of premarital cohabitation. The practice has been studied for more than 25 years, and there’s been significant disagreement from the start as to whether premarital cohabitation increases couples’ risk of divorce. Differences in researchers’ methodologies and priorities account for some of that disagreement. But in the curious, still-developing story of whether cohabitation does or doesn’t affect the odds of divorce, subjectivity on the part of researchers and the public may also play a leading role.
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Read More »Rhoades believes that studies should take into consideration couples’ intentions when they move in together—something neither of the recently published studies does. As she and her colleague Scott Stanley have found in their own research, when analyzing only couples who move in together with the intention of getting married, and thus excluding those who eschew marriage or just want to save money on rent, the heightened risk of divorce disappears. That’s because living together—which often results in a shared apartment lease or ownership of a home, joint custody of pets, or at the very least a shared accumulation of stuff—makes breaking up a greater logistical challenge. “Some couples move in together without really having a plan for their relationship, and they can ‘wind up’ getting married even though they may not have if they hadn’t been living together,” she says. Which in turn leads to a lower degree of marital satisfaction and a higher risk of divorce. But as Justin Lehmiller, a sex researcher at the Kinsey Institute and the author of the book Tell Me What You Want , says, there might be more to the scholarly controversy over cohabitation than just disagreements about methodology or analysis. “It’s not just that we’re talking about different outcomes; we’re talking about using the same data and showing different outcomes,” he told me. It comes down to: “Whose judgment do we trust more?” One reason Lehmiller thinks premarital cohabitation may be controversial among researchers is because the practice is controversial in general. It has historically been culturally frowned upon—it is, after all, an unapologetic signal to the outside world that premarital sex is being had in a particular household. In many places, that stigma lingers today, which could give the studies linking it to unsuccessful marriages some staying power.
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Read More »“Popular beliefs tend to die hard, even in the face of evidence that might disconfirm them,” Lehmiller said. “Some people might want to believe certain things about the impact of living together before marriage, maybe stemming from religious or moral beliefs.” But Rhoades pushed back on the suggestion that some bias toward confirming researchers’ own beliefs may be at work. “In general that can be true in psychology and in sociology; any scientific field, I think that can happen,” she said. “But because there’s such heated debate, I would bet that good researchers are extra careful about what they wind up publishing.” As researchers move toward a more nuanced understanding of what cohabitation means for the future of unmarried romantic partners, several factors urgently need to be considered, according to the experts I spoke with. Lehmiller said studies of cohabitation should start working with data sets that include same-sex couples and move away from equating the stability of a marriage with its success. “Some people have views about marriage that would lead them to stay in one even if it’s not satisfying,” he said. In other words, just because a marriage lasts doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best outcome for either party.
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