Re-post of my article from last week at The Institute for Family Studies
* * *
In my first piece
on Arielle Kuperberg’s study on cohabitation
that got so much media attention, I focused on broad conceptual issues. In this
piece, I am going to focus on more technical matters. While I remain impressed with
aspects of Kuperberg’s study, I have concerns about some of the conclusions that
can be drawn from the work. To recap, she showed that some of the risk of
cohabiting is related to the age at which partners move in together, with those
beginning to cohabit at a young age (just like those marrying at a young age)
being at a higher risk for divorcing the partner with whom they cohabited prior
to marriage. That’s an important finding, but I do not believe that it explains
everything that is associated with risk in some patterns of relationship
development that are associated with cohabitation before marriage.
To Whom Do the
Findings Apply?
Kuperberg
focused on a large sample that has many strengths for assessing outcomes
related to divorce. At the end of the day, her analyses tell us about people
who married their cohabiting partners, and whether or not that marriage was
more or less likely to end based on a history of cohabiting together prior to
marriage. By premarital, she means with a specific partner. Her main
findings—and the media headlines—are not directly related to other patterns of
risk, such as serial cohabitation or having an unplanned child together while
cohabiting—all of which are “premarital” in that they are before one marries. Since
cohabiting couples are decreasingly likely to eventually marry,[i] Kuperberg’s
main findings really focus on the increasingly select group who marries, either
with or without cohabiting first, without much else going on to complicate life
before marriage. As others have noted (e.g., Laura Tach and Sarah
Halpern-Meekin, 2009[ii]),
unmarried and premarital cohabitation has become a heterogeneous phenomenon
with many complex manifestations. I believe that part of the complexity lies in
the fact that there are substantially interrelated pathways of risk.
A colleague
of mine likened Kuperberg’s main conclusion, that cohabitation before marriage is
not risky regarding the odds of divorce, as similar to concluding that, among
those who are super fit and exercise a lot, eating less healthy food has almost
no consequence. I’m not a nutritionist, but I know people who are super fit who
can eat about anything and they are not going to imperil their health to the
same degree as others who are less fit. They burn it all up. I am not saying
that cohabitation is junk food. I’m focusing on relative risk: this analogy is
apt in that there is a lot of evidence that the pathways associated with some patterns
of cohabitation are, indeed, riskier than other pathways. Some people are not
at greater risk, and any individual’s risk level is related to a mix of variables
that includes personal characteristics, background, socio-economic
disadvantage, and, as I argue below, behaviors that increase risk.
We should
not, therefore, be surprised to find that those who are on a lower-risk pathway
(for example, as Kuperberg suggests, those who cohabit at age 23 years or
later), are at lower risk of divorce. But there are other pathways of
cohabiting prior to marriage that many people travel, such as cohabiting before
reaching clarity about any commitment to the future, cohabiting with multiple
partners, and having an unplanned child in a low-commitment cohabiting
relationship. (Cohabitation leads to increased odds of unplanned births.) As a
scientist oriented toward risk prevention, I don’t spend a lot of time worrying
about people who are already on a lower-risk pathway. I’m worried about
everyone else and what we convey to them publicly about what the literature
shows.
What About Marital and
Relationship Quality?
While the
sample Kuperberg uses has massive strengths, since it is large and
representative of the U.S., her analyses are limited to the outcome of divorce.
That’s fair. I think divorce is the single most important outcome that tells
you how a marriage goes. But divorce is not the same as marital quality or,
more specifically, marital happiness—another important outcome.
In our
research (with my colleagues Galena Rhoades and Howard Markman), we examine
marital quality in addition to divorce. We predicted long ago that those who
wait until either marriage or engagement to live together should be at lower
risk in marriage than those who cohabit prior to achieving clarity about a
commitment to the future. The premise here is based on what we call the inertia
of cohabitation[iii]:
it is harder to break up when cohabiting than it is to break up when dating but
not sharing a single address. I’m not saying that cohabiting couples do not
break up; they do all the time. But how can it not be harder to break up when
sharing a single address than when you have your own place? I can imagine
plenty of situations where people with different advantages and disadvantages are
at greater or lesser risk from inertia, but I cannot fathom how the inertia of
cohabiting is not greater than dating, on average, for just about everyone.
Here’s the
risk. Many couples move in together before having any clear and mutual commitment
to the future. Therefore, some people make it harder to break up with their
partner before they have settled the question of if they really are planning a
future with this person. Is everyone who cohabits without clear commitment about
the future at an elevated risk of divorce or an unhappy marriage? I do not
think so. For example, I think there are plenty of people who begin to cohabit
without having clarified any future path with their partner who do fine because
they land with someone who is a good partner for them anyway—very often, with the
same person they would have ended up with if they had been more cautious. But, on
average, the group with higher risk should be those who cohabit prior to attaining
mutual clarity about commitment because therein lies a subgroup who is at increased
risk for marrying someone they would not have married if they had never moved in
together. And some of the couples who do not marry will, nevertheless, be
together longer because of cohabitation, thereby increasing their odds of having an unplanned child
together, which puts both their child and their own future marriages at risk.
In other cases, people burn two or three years with someone they might have
broken up with and moved on from after 1 year without cohabitation. There is an
opportunity cost in that.
Based on
this theory about inertia, we have tested and shown (in study after study) that
cohabiting prior to marriage or making clear plans for marriage is associated with
less happiness and more negativity in marriage. These ideas are consistent with
the central advice Kuperberg gives in her paper: she suggests that people who
move in young are at increased odds of making a poor choice in their partner, which,
in turn, makes divorce more likely.
Norval Glenn, the famed sociologist
of the family who passed on a few years ago, termed this inertia-related risk “premature
entanglement.[iv]”
His central focus was how premature entanglement shortens a person’s search for
the best mate they may have otherwise obtained. If the average person thinks
they can get around the fact that cohabitation makes it harder to break up, all
other things being equal, they may be kidding themselves. For some, the
increased risk may be marginal or negligible. For others, it is life-altering.
My colleague Galena Rhoades and I like to recommend that people consider lower-cost
ways to figure out whether a person is the right partner for marriage—ways that
do not make it harder to break up even as you’re trying to figure out if a
future makes sense.
In one of our recent papers, Galena
Rhoades explained a type of risk that is unrecognized by some couples until
they experience it while living together.[v] In
this paper, which included some of the most sophisticated analyses we’ve ever
conducted on how couples change when they cohabit (controlling, powerfully, for
selection by examining within-person changes), she noted that, for many
couples, cohabitation combines two different developmental tasks in one period
of time. First, consistent with what I just noted above about inertia, many
(and likely most) cohabiting couples start living together before having
clarified their plans for the future. So even as they live together, they must
grapple with the big question about the future—which, when settled for a
couple, provides immense benefits to relationship quality because a clear sense
of a future together changes how people treat one another in the present. But
for many couples beginning to cohabit, this is anything but settled. Second,
moving in together involves changes in routines, roles, and expectations—just
as in marriage. (Kuperberg likewise discusses the potential issues that arise
when taking on new roles.)
When we recognize that many couples
are experiencing two challenging developmental stages at once as they move in
together, it is perhaps no wonder that we find that, after beginning to
cohabit, couples’ negative communication rises sharply, and both relationship
satisfaction and the perceived likelihood of marriage go down. Further, the
type of constraints that make it harder to break up take a large jump and start
to grow faster, and the type of commitment (dedication) most associated with
having a high-quality relationship levels off.
My key point here is that
relationship quality matters, and studies that focus on the risk for divorce
tell an important, but incomplete story. A lot of dimensions of a relationship
are impacted by cohabiting, with numerous implications for eventual marital
quality (and divorce).
Kuperberg’s Study Does
Not Examine Mechanisms of Risk
Kuperberg’s study is not designed
to examine specific mechanisms of risk in how relationships unfold. Here is a partial
list of what my colleagues and I think a lot about when it comes to mechanisms
of risk. Not all of them are specific to cohabitation (references provided as
examples).
·
Cohabitation can create inertia causing couples to
remain together prior to making a clear and mutual decision to be together in
marriage.[vi] This
is why we believe that cohabiting before a clear, settled commitment to
marriage is more risky than waiting until either after marriage or after having
mutual, public plans to marry.[vii]
·
Sex too soon can lead to cohabitation too soon,
perhaps leading to greater odds of remaining with a partner one would otherwise
not have remained with, or remained with for as long.[viii]
·
Some (maybe a lot) of the risk for divorce and
lower marital happiness associated with premarital cohabitation is driven by
non-marital births in the cohabiting population, with the risk being especially
strong for premarital births with the marital partner (these associations are stronger
for white women than black or Hispanic women).[ix]
·
Early sexual connection may create relationships
in which couples make key decisions about the future before other aspects of the
relationship have fully developed.[x]
·
Moving in together at a younger age (or
marrying, for that matter) is associated with increased risk for divorce.[xi]
Everything I just listed reflects something
about relationship transitions that can alter one’s future options. Different researchers
will focus on different risks, but I think all of these risks are in a similar
basket—including the variable Kuperberg proposes as mattering the most (young
age at co-residence). They all can be seen as involving “sliding” through
important, potentially life-altering transitions, rather than making
deliberate, adequately informed decisions about them after settling other
important matters for the individual or the couple.[xii] I
think sliding through such transitions is now a defining feature of how we do romantic
relationships before marriage in the U.S. In essence, this means people are
routinely getting the most valuable information about the prospects of a
relationship after they have already forfeited alternate options. Further, measuring
any of these patterns that may reflect this generic risk factor can make it
harder to detect others in social science because the overlapping variance is
so great among all the things on this list.
Kuperberg does not directly examine
these various pathways of risk except for age at co-residence, though many of
these things I just listed are intertwined with—or intensified in—cohabitation that
occurs prior to marriage (with the future spouse or with other partners). In
Kuperberg’s study, the variables most closely aligned with what I’d consider
mechanism of risk are entered as “demographic” control variables. Not all her
analyses use controls, but where she does, Kuperberg includes variables such as
age at co-residence (or age at marriage, depending), education, race/ethnicity,
family stability growing up, if one grew up religious or not, if one had
previously cohabited with someone other than the mate (serial cohabitation), if
the couple had moved in together while expecting a baby, and if there had been any
birth prior to cohabiting (within the relationship or from a prior one).
To me, three of these things are
not like the others: the last three. I would not classify them as mere demographic
controls. I see them as behaviors associated with mechanisms of risk. Another
colleague noted that these are really demographic events rather than demographic control variables. They are choices
that affect one’s odds of achieving stable and lasting love in marriage or
otherwise. The debate, of course, is in how much control a person really has,
and I fully accept that some people have a lot less ability to control some of
these things in their lives than others. There is certainly a lot of selection
involved, but unless you have a highly deterministic view of human behavior (and
many do), it seems wiser not to control for things that are highly interrelated
with your predictor (cohabitation) as you examine a specific outcome like divorce.
Of course, if you do use a lot of controls that involve complex patterns of
risk, then the conclusion you want others to draw from your findings should be
tightly specified so that the average person does not draw the wrong
conclusion.
In essence, Kuperberg was able to
show a reduction in the risk of divorce after cohabitation by controlling for
age at co-residence instead of age at marriage. However, even in this aspect of
her study, she shows that, for every age, those who cohabited before marriage
were still more likely to divorce (at least, this is how I would interpret
Figures 3 and 4 in her paper). She further reduces the association between
premarital cohabitation and divorce by introducing the “demographic controls”
noted above, but as I just explained, I think this amounts to controlling for
the types of risk deeply intertwined with cohabitation in a study that will be
understood as suggesting cohabitation does not matter. Not all of her analyses
use the extensive list of control variables, however, and I think her finding
that age of co-residence matters for marital outcomes makes a lot of sense.
There are some people who are not
in any way at greater risk for divorce or lower marital happiness because they
cohabited before marriage. But there is a rich set of interrelated risk
behaviors—the ones I listed above—that reflect a more complex story about
cohabitation than what the average person could have taken away from the media
coverage of Kuperberg’s study. I think we need to keep trying our best, as
social scientists, to make sure people can accurately see how various romantic
patterns can bend the whole curve of their future possibilities in life. Where
there is a complex story, we should try hard to tell it, despite the
limitations of our sound-bite world.
[i] Vespa,
J. (2014). Historical trends in the marital intentions of one-time and serial
cohabitors. Journal of Marriage and
Family, 76, 207-217.
[ii] Tach,
L., & Halpern-Meekin, S. (2009). How Does Premarital Cohabitation Affect
Trajectories of Marital Quality? Journal of Marriage & Family, 71(2),
298-317.
[iii] Stanley,
S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sliding vs. Deciding:
Inertia and the premarital cohabitation effect. Family Relations, 55, 499–509.
[iv] Glenn,
N. D. (2002). A plea for greater concern about the quality of marital matching.
In A. J. Hawkins, L. D. Wardle, and D. O. Coolidge (Eds.), Revitalizing the
institution of marriage for the twenty-first century: An agenda for
strengthening marriage (pp. 45-58). Westport, CT: Praeger.
[v] Rhoades,
G. K., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2012). The impact of the
transition to cohabitation on relationship functioning: Cross-sectional and
longitudinal findings. Journal of Family Psychology, 26(3), 348 - 358.
[vi] Stanley,
S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sliding vs. Deciding:
Inertia and the premarital cohabitation effect. Family Relations, 55, 499–509.;
[vii] Rhoades,
G. K., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2009). The pre-engagement
cohabitation effect: A replication and extension of previous findings. Journal
of Family Psychology, 23, 107-111.; Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., Amato, P.
R., Markman, H. J., & Johnson, C. A. (2010). The timing of cohabitation and
engagement: Impact on first and second marriages. Journal of Marriage and
Family, 72, 906-918.
[viii] Sassler,
S., Addo, F. R., & Lichter, D. T. (2012).
The tempo of sexual activity and later relationship quality. Journal of Marriage and Family, 74, 708 –
725.
[ix] Tach,
L., & Halpern-Meekin, S. (2009). How Does Premarital Cohabitation Affect
Trajectories of Marital Quality? Journal of Marriage & Family, 71(2),
298-317.
[x] Busby,
D. M., Carroll, J. S., & Willoughby, B. J. (2010). Compatibility or
Restraint? The Effects of Sexual Timing on Marriage Relationships. Journal of
Family Psychology, 24(6), 766-774.
[xi] Kuperberg,
A. (2014). Age at coresidence, premarital cohabitation, and marriage
dissolution: 1985-2009. Journal of Marriage & Family, 76(2), 352-369.;
regarding age at marriage, see Raley, R. K., & Bumpass, L. (2003). The topography of the divorce plateau: Levels
and trends in union stability in the United States after 1980. Demographic Research, 8, 245-260.; Teachman,
J. D. (2002). Stability across cohorts in divorce risk factors. Demography, 39,
331–351.
[xii] If
you want to read more about this risk model, there is a chapter available for
download. See page 28 and following, where it says “Our work on transition and
risk.” Stanley, S. M., & Rhoades, G. K. (2009). Marriages at risk:
Relationship formation and opportunities for relationship education. In H.
Benson and S. Callan (Eds.), What works in relationship education: Lessons from
academics and service deliverers in the United States and Europe (pp. 21 - 44).
Doha, Qatar: Doha International Institute for Family Studies and Development. https://app.box.com/s/qb5vmv6jkddt5zcd1vxt
; For the original finding that couples more often slide into cohabitation than
deliberate about what it all means, see:
Manning, W. D., & Smock, P. J. (2005). Measuring and modeling cohabitation: New
perspectives from qualitative data.
Journal of Marriage and Family, 67, 989 - 1002.; For our initial paper that details how we see
inertia and sliding mixing together to create added risk for some people, see:
Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sliding vs.
Deciding: Inertia and the premarital cohabitation effect. Family Relations, 55,
499–509.
