Practice Makes Perfect

Back in the 80's when the U.S. legalized No Fault divorce we saw a huge jump in divorce rates - up to 50%. During that time we also saw a large up-tick in cohabitation rates. Most researchers looked at this and hypothesized that these couples would actually fare better than couples who just jumped straight into marriage - after all, practice makes perfect, right?

Turns out this isn't actually the case. As the years passed by, the same researchers started to look at the data and they started to see that couples that were living together before they were married were actually ending more frequently. Thirty years down the road we're now seeing the results in pre-marital child-births, continual divorce rates, and late age of marriage. Now some people have looked at this and assumed cohabitation to be the kiss of death for relationships. On the other hand, if we look at the data, what we find is that most of these studies are actually lumping all cohabiting couples together into one big group of data. But when we step back and look at it, it's pretty easy to see that couples that are living together don't all have the same goals.

A 2011 study published by Brian Willoughby divided cohabiting couples into several different categories based on each partner's trajectory toward marriage (within a year, or longer), whether they agreed on marital trajectory, and their relationship status (dating or engaged). What he found was that the factor that made cohabiting couples the most unhappy was their agreement on marriage trajectory.

For instance, let's say Bob and Sally have been living together for a year, they're engaged, and they have a date set for the following year. Jimmy and Julie live upstairs from Bob and Sally. They've been living together for 2 years and Julie wants to get married, preferably within the next year, while Jimmy still isn't sure about the whole marriage thing. What Jimmy and Julie have is an incongruence of marital trajectories. According the Willoughby's research, Bob and Sally are going to have an overall greater relationship satisfaction, with better perception of communication and less likely to feel like their relationship is "on the rocks" - regardless of the fact that they've been together longer.

Willoughby reports that "being in either an incongruent engaged or incongruent non-engaged cohabiting relationship was associated with generally negative outcomes compared to other types of couples." And as you read through his entire article, what the statistics start to unravel is this idea of both people being on the same timeline. While the happiest and most stable of all of the couples were those who are living together and plan to marry within the next year, it's almost no contest that the unhappiest and most unstable of all of the couples are those who - whether living together or not and engaged or not - disagree on where their relationship is going.