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.<\/p>\n
This surprised a bunch of people, and seemed to disprove the “try it on before you buy it” theory of marriage.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Then the shacking up effect seemed to go away in some of Europe. For instance, a social scientist showed that although it used <\/em>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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>) shows that Americans who shack up before marrying aren’t more likely to get divorced.<\/p>\n This seems to put the kibosh on the “living in sin = doomed to divorce” theory.<\/p>\n Oh, and Americans getting married for the first time have a 33% chance of getting divorced someday<\/a> — 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?<\/p>\n For more discussion, see Pandagon<\/a>.<\/p>\n Curtsy: Ezra Klein<\/a>, Marginal Revolution<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading