According to a recent headline
in the Washington Post, “Living together is basically the same as marriage, study finds.” Is that true? I
do not think so, but it is worth grappling with the study and related findings.
The article is based on a study
by Sara Mernitz and Claire Kamp Dush, who found that people experienced gains
in emotional wellbeing after moving in with a partner, whether or not they got
married first.
What Mernitz and Kamp Dush Found
Mernitz and Kamp Dush examined changes in measure of emotional distress (think of this in reverse, as a measure of emotional wellbeing) across various relationship transitions, including moving in together, getting married without living together first, and marrying after living together. Using a large U.S. sample, they looked at the
first and second transitions of these sorts for people in their twenties. Quoting
from their Journal of Family Psychology
article, they found:
- “[E]ntrance into first cohabiting unions and direct marriages, and all second unions, were significantly associated with reduced emotional distress.”
- “Gender differences were found for first unions only; for men, only direct marriage was associated with an emotional health benefit, while both direct marriage and cohabitation benefited women’s emotional health.”
- “[T]ransitioning into marriage from a first, current cohabitation (Table 2, Model 3) was not associated with change in emotional distress; these results held for second unions in that transitioning into marriage with a second, current cohabiting partner was also not associated with a change in emotional distress.”
Consider two facts.
First, cohabiting relationships
are far less stable than marriages. While many marriages end in misery, far
more cohabiting relationships break up than end in lasting love or family stability.[i]
Most couples who cohabit these days do so before having formed or signaled a commitment
to the future (marked by marriage, engagement, or a declaration to others that
they intend to stay together). I believe that this point is routinely missed by
researchers and family policy experts. Part of the power of marriage, for all
its historical flaws, lies in the way it can signal an intention of a lifelong commitment between two partners and to
those around them in a particular sequence; the formation of commitment prior
to living together or pregnancy provides for better relationship outcomes on
average. For more on that subject, see this article that I wrote in 2014. I believe it to be the second most important
thing I’ve ever written.
Second, the relative instability
of cohabitation has important implications for children. An ever greater number
of unmarried, cohabiting couples have children, and these couples are far less
likely than married ones to raise their children together.[ii]
And it has become increasingly clear that children tend to fare best when
raised by their own two parents. In fact, as Wendy Manning makes clear in a
recent review, unmarried biological
parents who are continuously raising their children together are likely to see
outcomes for their children rivaling those for married couples.[iii]
But as Manning also points out, “Only one out of three children born to
cohabiting parents remains in a stable family through age 12, in contrast to
nearly three out of four children born to married parents.” This matters
because family instability is well understood to be a risk factor for the
wellbeing and development of children.[iv]
Some cohabiting couples are
highly committed and will build lasting, loving relationships without ever
marrying. But, in the main, cohabitation is simply not like marriage when it
comes to the level of commitment[v]
and the likelihood of achieving lasting stability. One can argue that they are
alike when controlling for commitment and intention, but that would miss the
main difference between the two.
Mernitz and Kamp Dush also found
that those entering a second cohabitation (or marriage) after breaking up from
a first showed important gains in emotional wellbeing with that second
transition. They suggested that this implies serial cohabitating may be less
detrimental than others have argued. I have more trouble believing this to be
true for most people than believing their basic findings about improved
emotional wellbeing from moving in together. Mernitz and Kamp Dush noted that this
interpretation is not consistent with other research, but they also suggested
that their methods are superior in some ways to those of prior studies on this
subject. But I think their findings are really not comparable because they did
not analyze long-term outcomes like divorce or marital happiness.[vi]
It’s not that I don’t believe that some people learn something from living with
a partner that leads to breaking up, and then subsequently find a better match.
It’s more that I believe the complications and risks of cohabitation—such as
the inertia of living together, which puts people at risk of getting
stuck—prior to marriage or at least engagement outweighs potential benefits for
most people.
Based on what I see in the
literature, I don’t believe people should expect to cohabit with a number of different
partners before settling down, and assume that doing so will improve their odds
of lasting love and family stability. That may be the case in the future, but I
do not see evidence that that’s how things work now. If you are thinking about
this path, consider how you might learn about who is a good partner for you
without making it harder to break up in the process.
Emotional Wellbeing or Relationship Quality: An Empirical Quandary
My colleagues Galena Rhoades and
Howard Markman and I examined changes in relationship dynamics across the
transition into living together in a paper published in 2012 (in the same
journal as Mernitz and Kamp Dush’s study).[vii]
Mernitz and Kamp Dush noted they were unable to study dimensions such as relationship
quality; our study methods were optimized for doing just that.
Both their study and ours had a
substantial strength not typical for this literature. Both used methods that
allowed people to be compared to themselves, before and after the transitions being
examined. It is more typical in this field to contrast one group (say, married
people) with another entirely different group of people (say, cohabiters) while
trying to control for important selection differences between the groups. Methods
that compare people to themselves across transitions control for some elements
of selection characteristics.[viii]
(For more on the subject of selection and how it confounds researchers, see
these pieces I’ve written: here
and here
and here.)
In contrast to Mernitz and Kamp
Dush, we were able to look at both levels and directions (slopes) of variables
before and after people moved in with their partners. So, for example, we could
see not only the average level of commitment to one’s partner before and after moving
in together, but also if that variable was rising or falling leading up to the transition
and what direction it started going afterward. Mernitz and Kamp Dush had the
benefit of a much larger sample; we had the benefit of many more time points
close to the transitions, and of more variables related to the quality of the
relationships.
Here are a few highlights from
our study (all on average, of course):
- Dedication to one’s partner increases in the lead-up to moving in together but then levels off after the transition. It does not become as high as what you’d expect for those who are going to have a successful marriage.
- Different types of constraints—factors that make break-ups less likely regardless of partners’ dedication[ix]—show large increases upon moving in together[x] and then start to grow more rapidly.
- Conflict increases and starts to climb steadily after moving in together.
- The frequency of sex moves up modestly after a couple moves in together and then declines steadily to become lower than it had been before the transition.
In case you are wondering, my
colleague Galena Rhoades and I expect pretty much the same pattern to be true
of marriage but with one important difference: partners who wait until marriage
or at least engagement to cohabit tend to have higher and more mutual levels of
dedication to a future together.[xi]
If your goal is lasting love with a strong relationship as a foundation for a
family, think carefully about the conditions under which you’d move in with
someone. And decide if you think
marriage and cohabitation are essentially the same—for your life.
[i] Vespa,
J. (2014). Historical
trends in the marital intentions of one-time and serial cohabitors. Journal of Marriage and Family, 76(1),
207-217. doi: 10.1111/jomf.12083
[ii] Kennedy,
S., & Bumpass, L. (2008). Cohabitation and
children’s living arrangements: New estimates from the United States. Demographic Research, 19(47), 1663–1992;
Manning, W. D., Smock, P. J., and Majumdar, D. (2004). The
relative stability of cohabiting and marital unions for children. Population Research and Policy Review, 23(2),
135-159.
[iii] Manning,
W. D. (2015). Cohabitation
and child wellbeing. The Future of
Children, 25(2), 51–66.
[iv] Manning,
W. D. (2015). Cohabitation
and child wellbeing. The Future of
Children, 25(2), 51–66; McLanahan, S., & Beck, A. N. (2010). Parental
relationships in fragile families. The
Future of Children, 20(2), 17-37.
[v]
While the sample we used is older, I do not believe any recent trends would
change the finding that married couples have higher average levels of
commitment than cohabiting couples: Stanley, S. M., Whitton, S. W., and Markman, H. J. (2004). Maybe I do:
Interpersonal commitment and premarital or nonmarital cohabitation. Journal of Family Issues, 25(4),
496-519. doi: 10.1177/0192513X03257797. And sociologist Steven Nock predicted, in
what I believe is the last piece written by him before his untimely passing,
that the differences between marriage and cohabitation would become starker
over time: Nock, S.L. (2009). The growing importance of marriage in
America. In H. E. Peters and C. M. Kamp
Dush (Eds.), Marriage and family: Perspectives and
complexities (pp. 302-324). New York: Columbia University Press.
[vi] Lichter,
D., and Qian, Z. (2008). Serial
cohabitation and the marital life course. Journal of Marriage & Family, 70(4), 861-878.; Rhoades, G. K.,
& Stanley, S. M. (2014). “Before
‘I Do’: What do premarital experiences have to do with marital quality among
today’s young adults?” Charlottesville, VA:
National Marriage Project.
[vii] Rhoades,
G. K., Stanley, S.M., and 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.
doi: 10.1037/a0028316
[viii]
This is the subject of a paper I like a lot: Johnson, D. (2005). Two-wave
panel analysis: Comparing statistical methods for studying the effects of
transitions. Journal of Marriage and
Family, 67(4), 1061-1075.
[ix] Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., and Markman, H. J. (2010). Should I stay or should I go? Predicting dating relationship stability from four aspects of commitment. Journal of Family Psychology, 24(5), 543-550.
[x] As
we predicted in Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., and Markman, H. J. (2006).
Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the premarital cohabitation effect. Family Relations, 55(4), 499-509.
[xi] Rhoades,
G. K., Stanley, S. M., and Markman, H. J. (2006). Pre-engagement
cohabitation and gender asymmetry in marital commitment. Journal
of Family Psychology, 20(4), 553-560.