Once upon a time, social scientists showed that couples who lived together before marrying, were more likely to divorce than couples who didn’t live together until marrying. This was true in Europe, Canada and the USA.
This surprised a bunch of people, and seemed to disprove the “try it on before you buy it” theory of marriage.
This did, however, greatly please those social conservatives who prefer to go though life in a constant panic, screaming “the marriage rates are falling! The marriage rates are falling!” They felt this proved their theory that sex without God’s blessing introduces some sort of intrinsic rot into marriages and made them more likely failures.
Then the shacking up effect seemed to go away in some of Europe. For instance, a social scientist showed that although it used to be the case that shacking up made divorce more likely in Denmark, once shacking up became more commonplace, it stopped having any relationship with divorce. Couples who shacked up before marrying were no more likely to get divorced than couples who lived apart until the wedding.
This supports the theory that when shacking up is a radical, unusual thing to do, the people who self-select into shacking up are also the people who, due to their unconventional preferences, are less likely to remain married.
Now shacking up has become the norm in the USA; slightly over half of all American women live with someone before they get married. And the most recent data (.pdf link) shows that Americans who shack up before marrying aren’t more likely to get divorced.
This seems to put the kibosh on the “living in sin = doomed to divorce” theory.
Oh, and Americans getting married for the first time have a 33% chance of getting divorced someday — not “over half,” as is often claimed. In fact, the US divorce rate is lower than it’s been in decades — and it’s lowest of all in Massachusetts, home of same-sex marriage. Wait, wasn’t same-sex marriage supposed to destroy marriage rates?
For more discussion, see Pandagon.
Curtsy: Ezra Klein, Marginal Revolution.
I seriously love this news.
I guess I shouldn’t try to generalize from my own experience, but it’s hard for me to believe that living in sin didn’t have a bearing on my own divorce. Especially when my wife caught me at it.
I always thought that there were any number of possible explanations for why “living in sin” might correlate with divorce but not cause divorce. First, there might simply be trends. I believe that newer marriages are more prone to break up than older ones. That is, the most risky year for a marriage (or a baby, or a computer, or a car, or …) is the first; many terminal defects become apparent early. Plus, marriages among young people are more prone to break up, if for no other reason than the longer you have to live in your marriage, the more years there are in which to get divorced. Given these dynamics, I would expect to find a correlation between divorce and ANYTHING that a younger cohort is more prone to do than an older cohort: living together before marriage, having sex, going to school, listening to contemporary music, chatting on the internet, failing to start an IRA account, avoiding two-tone shoes, etc. Now that the trend of living together before marriage is becoming a norm – that is, now that it is no longer a marker of a younger cohort – it no longer correlates with the problems of youth.
Then there is the question of WHY people would choose to live together. There seems to be an assumption that people are lured by a demand for housing that includes sex, Sex, SEX! But there’s also the issue of supply. I’m more likely to move in with my significant other if I have no other choice of housing – if my parents are abusive or homeless or absent, for example, and I lack any other social network. But I understand that people who come from these circumstances are more prone to divorce REGARDLESS of whether they live with a significant other before marriage. Again, we’d see correlation without causation. But why would we see a change in the data now? After all, presumably people in these desperate circumstances continue to choose to live in sin, and continue to get married and divorced, just as always. Sure; but to the extent that less desperate people are also now living in sin, they now dilute the effects of their more desperate neighbors.
>Oh, and Americans getting married for the first time have a 33% chance of getting divorced someday — not “over half,” as is often claimed.
I’ve often wondered with the “half” statistic if TPTB factored in multiple marriages and divorces. I mean, some people may rush into marriages and divorces serially, and others get divorced twice, some don’t get divorced if married and others never get married, etc.
>After all, presumably people in these desperate circumstances continue to choose to live in sin, and continue to get married and divorced, just as always. Sure; but to the extent that less desperate people are also now living in sin, they now dilute the effects of their more desperate neighbors.
Nobody.really, that sounds at least plausible. and likely for a lot of people.
The other thing that comes to mind is that there seems to be a 5-10 year shelf-life to monogamous relationships/partnerships (the infamous “7 year itch”), which IMO probably correlates to changes in life goals, change in maturity levels, stresses of parenthood or in elder care, financial stresses, that can make a couple either 1) reevaluate and reform their relationship to fit who they are NOW, or 2) drift apart and end the relationship. So if people live together X amount of years and don’t deal with typical relationship problems, and then get married, and then divorced, it can look like the “living together” part of the relationship was the problem, when it was other factors, especially when the couple has lived together longer than they’d been married.
Of course that then brings up the reasons people get married. IF it’s to placate family, it may be doomed. If it’s for relatively objective reasons and the rest of the relationship is comfortable and secure, then it will likely work out. I moved in with my fiance 6 months before the wedding because he needed to start moving his life, essentially, from one state to another. One of my best friends got married so that her fiance could take over her medical care when she was terminally ill – in one afternoon at the courthouse, he went from being kicked out of the hospital after visiting hours were over to being able to be there 24-7. Another friend has been married a year but partnered to her husband for 20 years. They alternately put each other through school, shared ownership of a house, etc. and were missing out on the combined tax benefits, and all the other benefits that come with federally and state recognized marriage.
>Wait, wasn’t same-sex marriage supposed to destroy marriage rates?
Heh. Yeah, right. My husband and I have a running joke that so isn’t funny. “So, hon, are you feeling like you want to leave me and marry Chris? Is our marriage threatened yet? Nope? yeah, me neither.”
>others get divorced twice
Sorry, should be divorced once. Otherwise it doesn’t make much sense…
I feel it’s apt, even annoyingly obvious, to point out that the single leading cause of divorce is marriage, and that if people simply kept living in sin instead of getting married, our divorce rate would drop quite drastically.
(Yes, I am happily living in sin as I type this. With hopeful plans for an eventual wedding, but not so much an actual legal marriage.)
Massachusetts and New Hampshire are usually 1-2 on lowest divorce rate and lowest teen pregnancy rate. If memory serves, much more conservative states in much more conservative parts of the country tend to have the highest rates. (New Hampshire is more conservative than Massachusetts, but largely in a small-government, civil-libertarian way — live free or die and all that — not in a bed-checking way.) One explanation I can think of for the divorce statistic is that there are fewer forced marriages (shotgun weddings), especially where the bride and groom are very young, and maybe people tend to live in sin longer and therefore pass the 7-10-year threshold and break up before marriage. The teen-pregnancy statistic might be due to better availability of birth control and/or less stigma attached to using it. (I have no idea if either of these explanations is even partly right, I’m just speculating.)
Oh, and my marriage became void and utterly meaningless on the day same-sex marriage became valid. But we figured, hey, after 23 years we’re going to keep living together anyway, why bother with the paperwork?