Our bestselling book on divorce prevention, Fighting for Your Marriage has been released and is available now (as of September 11, 2024).
For more information on the new edition, including how to order your copy, visit our author website at Fighting for Your Marriage.
I gave a talk at the 2023 meeting for NARME.org on 7-25-2023 with the latest findings from new data on premarital cohabitation.
You can download a pdf handout of my slides, here.
The report Galena Rhoades and I wrote from the new data collected last year by YouGov for the Institute for Family Studies is available at their blog. You can scroll to the bottom of the executive summary on this page and download the entire report. We wrote a subsequent deeper dive on the nature of the transition into cohabitation for many couples that is also at IFS, here, which is duplicated in the prior blog post here below.
By Scott Stanley & Galena Rhoades
We have predicted this pattern based on the fact that cohabitation has greater inertia than dating. Specifically, moving in together leads to a marked increase in constraints favoring remaining together, but it does not, on average, lead to further growth in dedication to a future together.[ii] Inertia implies that some who cohabit before marriage might have broken up if they hadn’t lived together, and/or may enter marriage with an attenuated sense of internal volition because of constraints.[iii] For some, living together is a manifestation of what Norval Glenn called premature entanglement.[iv] Those who have already strongly clarified their marital intentions before moving in together, by marriage or engagement, will be less likely to have these risks.
Clarity and volition are foundational to the formation of commitment. Commitment is making a choice to give up other choices.[v] It involves making a decision. The literature on cognitive consistency and dissonance highlights how decisions and prior acts can provide strong anchors for follow-through, especially when these elements are explicit and perceived to be volitional.[vi]
In contrast, for some people, cohabitation before clarity about commitment may produce something more akin to “maybe I do” than a fully volitional “I do” at the foundation of their marriage.[vii]
Sliding vs. Deciding
These thoughts about commitment highlight the importance of how, when, and why couples start living together. Several qualitative studies have looked at the process of moving in together.[viii] Is the transition explicit and clear? Is there typically a decision reflecting anything to do with commitment? Is the transition experienced as volitional? The existing studies suggest that the answers to these questions are most often “No.”
A qualitative study by Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock in 2005 focused on how the measurement of union formation needed to adjust to differences between cohabitation and marriage. In examining how couples make decisions about living together, they found that there was typically no decision or discussion about the nature of the relationship. They wrote, “Their decision may be better characterized as a slide into cohabitation,” with “no conscious decision-making process.”
Although this phenomenon had been observed before (as they note), Manning and Smock found that just over half of the cohabiting couples they interviewed had slid or drifted into living together without making any clear decision about it. They concluded that the transition into cohabitation is not like marriage and should be treated differently by researchers.
In 1972, Eleanor Macklin studied the relationships of undergraduate women at Cornell. She observed that moving in together was “seldom the result of a considered decision.” The process was gradual and better described as something people “drifted” into. In a 1983 paper, Patrick Jackson noted that “cohabitation can be understood as a gradual movement characterized by drift in a situation of opportunity isolated from immediate social controls.” All of these researchers caught the drift, but Manning and Smock’s sample better represents what cohabitation often looks like today.
This pattern of sliding into cohabitation had become so recognized in the culture by the mid-1990s that the sitcom Spin City captured the dynamic beautifully in its first episode in 1996. The context is an upper middle-class couple, but the dynamic is the same as described by couples at various levels of resources.
It’s evening and Mike (played by Michael J. Fox) learns his colleagues are coming over, and likely will stay late working. Mike recommends that Ashley, his girlfriend (played by Carla Gugino), head back to her place so she can sleep. Ashely says she can’t, because she no longer has a place; the lease ran out a few weeks before. Choking up with anxiety, Mike says, “So, we live together? . . . I feel I should have been told.” Ashley points out all the evidence that they had gradually come to be living together.[ix]
That’s a transition without a decision.
Ambiguity versus Commitment
In a paper published in 2000, Jo Lindsay reported on interviews with cohabiting Australians. As with the studies mentioned above, she noted the ubiquity of gradual transitions, with many respondents reporting some form of “it just happened.” Lindsay concluded: “Most cohabiters did not see moving in as a significant transition, emphasizing continuity rather than change.”
Lindsay further stressed a lack of ownership of any decision or clear intention, noting that “The cohabiters minimized their agency when they discussed their decision to move in.” They didn’t choose it; it happened to them. In fact, only one of her 30 respondents described feeling the need to discuss the nature of the relationship and make a clear decision about the transition. Lindsay wrote, “If the nature of the relationship is undefined, levels of commitment are also kept undefined.”
Manning and Smock reported that most of their respondents did not discuss—and made no decision about—marriage versus cohabitation. Lindsay noticed that her respondents gave quick and nervous “No” answers when asked if they had talked about marriage at the time of moving in together. In her words, they “dodged” the topic. She noted that the transition was often deliberately kept ambiguous to allow the exit door to be left open. This is the essence of motivated ambiguity,[x] and it is consistent with the way cohabitation has, for many, become something more akin to dating than marriage.
In 1995, Steven Nock described cohabitation as an incomplete institution, as it lacks consensual norms, laws, and definition. It is no wonder people have trouble describing the process of entering into it. Although cohabitation is an alternative to marriage for some committed couples, it is generally a relationship form where the ambiguity (and lower average levels of commitment) is widely seen as a feature, not a bug. The absence of a formal decision or commitment between two partners is part of the appeal. Options remain open, but in a context where inertia—or life constraints like having a baby—is growing and foreclosing those options.
Cohabitation and transitions into it are generally ambiguous unless further defined by signals about commitment. Susan Brown and Alan Booth have shown that cohabiters who report marriage plans are more like marrieds than cohabiters who do not report such plans. This aligns with our focus on the timing of commitment to marriage relative to moving in together, but we emphasize additional reasons why that timing matters. Just as inertia implies, the risks are loaded up for those who start living together before nailing down commitment in, or to, marriage. That’s the group cohabiting in the most ambiguous context. Marriage and engagement are non-ambiguous signals about the commitment between two partners.
For whom is ambiguity a risk? There is a growing divergence in marital and family destinies based on race/ethnicity, education, and resources.[xi] Those with more disadvantages have become much less likely to marry and more likely to cohabit, with a deepening divide in family stability. We believe that, regardless of a person’s options or pathways in life, the risks of ambiguity grow as relationships become more serious and constraints increase.
In 2006, we published a paper in which we wove all the themes above into a theory of why cohabitation before marriage is associated with higher average risks for difficulties in marriage, net of selection, and we extended that reasoning to other important relationship transitions.
The Process Matters
Sliding versus deciding has many applications. The contrast captures the way most couples move in together, which, as Manning and Smock put it, is typically a slide. At the root, sliding reflects a process devoid of discussion or decision. The phrasing is also great short-hand for times in life, big or small, when a moment to make a decision is lost. For example, couples often slide into nasty arguments when one or both partners could have decided to take things in a different direction.
Put into the context of the formation of commitment, the contrast between sliding and deciding highlights the chasm between ambiguous relationship transitions and commitments founded in volition and intention. Further, given our focus on the risks of ambiguity and inertia, we believe the word Manning and Smock chose, “slide”, is superior to the word “drift”, which has often been used by scholars to describe various relationship transitions. Drifting is always passive. Sliding can be passive or active, and when active, it’s often in the service of avoiding clarity. That matters because sliding can lead to increased constraints that were not explicitly chosen—and sticking feels different than stuck.
The widely noted decline in scripts for romantic relationship development makes it hard for two people to clarify what is happening. As a result, it takes more skill than it used to require to navigate relationships. Some people have these skills, but most do not. Unfortunately, “It happened to me” cannot possibly be as strong a foundation for commitment as an unalloyed “I chose this.”
This post first appeared on the blog for the Institute for Family Studies on May 24, 2023.
[i] This pattern is durable over several decades: 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.; Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., Markman, H. J., & Allen, E. S. (2015). Can marriage education mitigate the risks associated with premarital cohabitation? Journal of Family Psychology, 29(3), 500-506.
[ii] 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.; The contrast between dedication and constraint (or like terms) is foundational in theories of commitment (e.g., Michael Johnson, George Levinger, Caryl Rusbult, and Scott Stanley). On average, dedication does increase ahead of moving in together but then it levels off, and not at a particularly high level. Such findings are important because it is generally desirable for dedication to mature at a high level before constraints grow too large.
[iii] Kline (Rhoades), G. H., Stanley, S. M., Markman, H. J., Olmos-Gallo, P. A., St. Peters, M., Whitton, S. W., & Prado, L. (2004). Timing is everything: Pre-engagement cohabitation and increased risk for poor marital outcomes. Journal of Family Psychology, 18, 311-318.; Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sliding versus Deciding: Inertia and the premarital cohabitation effect. Family Relations, 55(4), 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] This point first appears in this book, which contains a blend of insights from theology, research, and psychology on commitment in marriage: Stanley, S. (1998). The heart of commitment. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
[vi] Kiesler, C. (1971). The psychology of commitment. New-York: Academic Press.; Brehm, J. W., & Cohen, A. R. (1962). Explorations in Cognitive Dissonance. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
[vii] This specific observation was based on data from that time showing that men in marriages of couples who had lived together prior to marriage were substantially less committed to their mates than men in the marriages of those who had not, despite the fact that all had become married: Stanley, S. M. (2002, July). What is it with Men and Commitment, Anyway? Keynote address to the 6th Annual Smart Marriages Conference, Washington D. C.; Stanley, S. M., Whitton, S. W., & Markman, H. J. (2004). Maybe I do: Interpersonal commitment and premarital or nonmarital cohabitation. Journal of Family Issues, 25, 496-519.
[viii] Note that these studies examine relationships regardless of a future in marriage whereas analyses such as those we presented in the new report are from a sample where everyone married.
[ix] They are living together in a way consistent with our preferred definition based on inertia: two people sharing a single address without either having their own, separate place.
[x] Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Fincham, F. D. (2011). Understanding romantic relationships among emerging adults: The significant roles of cohabitation and ambiguity. In F. D. Fincham & M. Cui (Eds.), Romantic relationships in emerging adulthood (pp. 234-251). New York: Cambridge University Press.
[xi] Lamidi, E. O., Manning, W. D., & Brown, S. L. (2019). Change in the stability of first premarital cohabitation among women in the United States, 1983–2013. Demography, 56, 427-450.; Sassler, S., & Miller, A. (2017). Cohabitation nation: Gender, class, and the remaking of relationships. Oakland: University of California Press.; Smock, P. J., & Schwartz, C. R. (2020). The demography of families: A review of patterns and change. Journal of Marriage and Family, 82(1), 9-34.
Galena Rhoades and I have a new report out on premarital cohabitation, published by The Institute for Family Studies.
You can get it here.
Family Expectations is a program for lower income, expectant parents (or those who recently had a baby) in Oklahoma City that has been the subject of three large, randomized controlled trials.
We have published three papers to date on the most recent findings from an evaluation of this program. The links here will take you to full versions of articles that can be read online (1 & 3) or downloaded (2).
If you are interested in the relationship education field, you may like reading this timely update at: DeseretNews
I did a webinar for the Dibble Institute on January 12, 2020. It is available online:
I also wrote detailed responses to questions asked during the webinar that were not covered during it. That is available here:
https://www.dibbleinstitute.org/wp-new/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Stanley-Q-A-Dibble-Webinar.pdf
Below, I have placed links to a bunch of posts on themes covered in the webinar.
A 2018 post on trends in cohabitation based on new data from the CDC released at that time.
https://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2018/07/cohabitation-is-common-update-on-trends.html
An overview of the inertia hypothesis and why living together before marriage may not provide the benefits that most people expect.
http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-mystery-why-isnt-living-together.html
A post reviewing the inertia theory with scores of links related to the idea that cohabitation increases inertia, which, for some couples, makes it harder to leave before they had worked out a commitment to the future together.
https://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2018/03/citations-for-tests-of-inertia_26.html
A fun, engaging video from the team at PREP on inertia.
On YouTube: Relationship DUI
Two articles on the research by Rosenfeld and Roesler that shook up the assumption that cohabitation before marriage no longer leads to increased risk in marriage.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/premarital-cohabitation-is-still-associated-with-greater-odds-of-divorce
https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-cohabitation-still-linked-to-greater-odds-of-divorce
dMotivated Ambiguity: Is this a date or not?
http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2014/01/motivated-ambiguity.html
Weak and Strong Links: Asymmetrical Commitment in Unmarried Relationships
https://ifstudies.org/blog/weak-and-strong-links-asymmetrical-commitment-in-unmarried-relationships
Links to papers and articles related to asymmetrical commitment
https://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2019/01/some-links-about-asymmetrical-commitment.html
You can lower your risk of divorce. Advice to singles
http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2015/03/you-can-lower-your-risk-of-divorce.html
Searching for "The One": Mate Selection in this Modern World
http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2016/05/searching-for-one-mate-selection-in.html
Attachment and the Perfect Storm. A piece speculating about the difficulties for forming attachment in an ambiguous relationship world.
http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2012/03/attachment-and-perfect-storm.html
The concepts of we-ness and couple identity arise throughout philosophy, literature, poetry, and social science. I mostly want to describe the latter, but I will first briefly touch on a couple of the more ancient takes.
Genesis 2 describes how Adam and Eve will be “united and become one flesh.” Although that line is preeminently describing the physical union, the passage resonates deeply with so many because of the implication of a deeper bond. Aristotle wrote, “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” This goes further than two becoming one. As the writer of philosiblog notes, Aristotle was most likely inspired to write that based on the ideas of his mentor, Plato, who wrote that humans were originally made with two heads, two faces, and four arms and legs. Setting aside other complexities in Plato’s view, he writes that this initial version of humans was a threat to the gods, so Zeus had them split in two. The now half-not-whole beings were consigned to spend their days searching for their other half.
Both of these ancient thoughts hover around the nature of individuality and oneness, but the nuances and traditions around them are different in how they relate to views of mating, love, and marriage. In one view, two identities were intentionally created with the idea that they would seek to be one in core aspects of life. In the other, one entity was split into two for the express purpose of inflicting a weakness. There are doubtless many variations of these ideas in every culture that ever existed.
As these and other themes suggest, there is a fundamental human drive to seek and be in a relationship that has this quality of “us.” To join with another. Beyond this central fact, there are healthier and less healthy views of what “becoming us” can be like. Here, I describe how this notion arises in my field of the study of commitment in intimate relationships.
We-ness
I first heard the term “we-ness” in graduate school. That was awhile ago but well after Aristotle wrote things down. In talking with other research psychologists about relationships, the term would come up from time to time, denoting a relationship where two people had formed a depth of connection that supported a sense of shared identity.
When I turned my focus to the study of commitment in 1983, I found supporting ideas consistently arising in that literature. Harold Kelley and John Thibaut described how two partners who were growing in interdependence would move from having only individual goals to developing a view of the future based on joint outcomes. [i] They called this “transformation of motivation.” Although they almost never used the word “commitment,” what they were describing was the psychological formation of it. Similarly, George Levinger noted that ‘‘as interpersonal involvement deepens, one’s partner’s satisfactions and dissatisfactions become more and more identified with one’s own.”[ii] Social exchange theorists such as Cook and Emerson discussed how the “transformation” from me to we changed a relationship from an exchange market where two individuals were competitors to a non-competitive relationship that could maximize joint outcomes.[iii] One is no longer seeking (only) individual gains from the other, but something for us as a team.
I came to view commitment between two partners as the condition where there has emerged a strong sense of “us with a future.”
One of the most influential scholars in the field of commitment in psychology was Caryl Rusbult, who, along with her many colleagues[iv], framed and refined a theory of interdependence drawn largely from the work of other interdependence theorists such as Thibaut, Kelley, and Levinger. Her early work focused was on how commitment developed in relationships, with increasing mutual investments, curtailing of attention to alternatives, and a deepening desire for a future with the partner. It was in a publication in 1998 by Agnew, Van Lange, Rusbult, and Langston[v] that I first noticed a writer in social science using the term “we-ness.” They used the term in contrasting friendships and romantic relationships, suggesting that because sexuality was in play in the latter, there was a stronger possibility of two individuals merging into one in a way that fostered we-ness. Not really that far from the ideas of the ancients.
In 1986, I had developed a set of measures for assessing commitment in romantic relationships, dividing the world—as had the sociologist Michael Johnson[vi] before me—into the broad themes of dedication and constraint. I described subconstructs of those two dimensions and developed measures of them that Howard Markman and I published in 1992.[vii]
I defined couple identity as “the degree to which an individual thinks of the relationship as a team, in contrast to viewing it as two separate individuals, each trying to maximize individual gains.” In trying to assess whether or not a person had a sense of a shared identity with their partner, some of the items go right to the concept of “me” vs “we.” For example:
I like to think of my partner and me more in terms of "us" and "we" than "me" and "him/her".
Or, in the reverse:
I want to keep the plans for my life somewhat separate from my partner's plans for life.
We-ness and Me-ness in Modern Times
Discussions of we-ness raise concerns about psychological enmeshment. In discussions with others in psychology, the term “we-ness” always arose as a positive thing, and a characteristic of a thriving relationship. If a relationship was otherwise safe and healthy, we-ness was good, but the dark side of the coin is enmeshment, which implies the obliteration of one or both identities in some manner.
I have long described a healthy sense of a couple identity with images. These are just a few of the possibilities.
The top left image is one of many possible depictions of enmeshment. One person’s identity is absorbed into the other. The top right image reflects two lives being connected but without having developed an identity of us—or at least, not yet. The final image is meant to portray a healthy, clear sense of us, while retaining a clear understanding that there are two separate individuals. Three identities: You, me, us. You could certainly draw versions of the image on the bottom that reflect individual identities that are largely included in the “us” but with parts unshared or less shared, such as about work or deep interests of the individual identities that are not so clearly a part of what the essence of the “us” is. The key point is that, in a strongly committed relationship, there will be some identity of us, and it will have a boundary.
In some relationships, there is a painful reality where both the top right and bottom drawings reflect the reality of the relationship, with one partner wanting the former and the other preferring or only capable of the latter. Those are situations where one partner is substantially less committed than the other, and likely a lot less willing to have, develop, or nurture that third identity.
Although there is no data that I know of that could directly test this, it seems evident that modernity has fostered ever greater levels of individualism. It is not hard to posit that this complicates the development of relationships characterized by having a shared, couple identity. Yet this is true in the same era in which we also see an emergence (or re-emergence?) of a desire for a relationship of a sort described in a famous line from the movie Jerry Maguire: “You complete me.” Aristotelian elevator talk, really. That’s not just you and me developing a sense of us, that third identity, it’s “I am not whole without you.”
All these ideas touch on the concept of soulmates. There are versions of this idea that are appealing, but I believe it has two problems. First, it implies that there is one perfect match out there for each person. Second, it supports the illusion that finding that person would make love and marriage blissful. But that search becomes formidable, and there are negative effects of holding expectations that your soulmate will complete you in only the most wonderful way. That might be the resolution of the paradox of a growing individualism overlapping with a growing desire to find one’s soulmate. It would take a relationship with astounding gravity to overcome the escape velocity fueled by individualism.
There is a healthy idea of we-ness that does not imply either enmeshment or finding perfection in a partner. Not everyone wants we-ness. Some may desire it but avoid it out of problems with attachment that may be directly linked to childhood experiences. But, for those who want the “us” in their life, they will have to look for a relationship with the right balance of me and we, and then invest in protecting it. Two perfect partners are rarely joining as one, but two imperfect partners can get pretty far in life if they nurture the sense of “us with a future.”
This article first appeared at the blog for the Institute for Family Studies, 6-14-2021.
[i] Kelley, H. H., & Thibaut, J. W. (1978). Interpersonal relations: A theory of interdependence. New York: Wiley.
[ii] Levinger, G. (1979). A social exchange view on the dissolution of pair relationships. In R.L. Burgess and T.L. Huston (Eds.), Social Exchange in Developing Relationships (pp. 169-193). New York: Academic Press.
[iii] Cook, K.S., & Emerson, R.M. (1978). Power, equity and commitment in exchange networks. American Sociological Review, 43, 721-739.
[iv] There are so many citations emanating from this work, but a couple of classics are: Rusbult, C. E. (1980). Commitment and satisfaction in romantic associations: A test of the investment model. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 16, 172-186.; Rusbult, C. E., & Buunk, B. P. (1993) Commitment processes in close relationships: An interdependence analysis. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 10, 175 204.
[v] Agnew, C. R., van Lange, P. A., Rusbult, C. E., & Langston, C. A. (1998). Cognitive interdependence: Commitment and the mental representation of close relationships. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 74, 939-954.
[vi] e.g., Johnson, M. P. (1973). Commitment: A conceptual structure and empirical application. Sociological Quarterly, 14, 395-406.
[vii] Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (1992). Assessing commitment in personal relationships. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 54, 595-608. DOI: 10.2307/353245
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| Photo: Toa Heftiba via unsplash.com |
In 2018, Michael Rosenfeld and Katharina Roesler published a study that contradicted the growing consensus in sociology that premarital cohabitation was no longer associated with greater odds of divorce, even though it had been associated with poorer marital outcomes for decades. The explanation various scholars had given for the cohabitation effect going away are based on the diffusion perspective, which suggests that cohabitation has become so common it no longer selects for those already at higher risk, and also that it has lost the stigma it once had, leading to more acceptance by friends and family. But Rosenfeld and Roesler’s study showed that the association between premarital cohabitation and divorce has not declined over the years in any substantial manner. They argued that prior studies showing no negative associations were based on samples that did not include marriages that had lasted long enough to fully capture the increased risk for divorce.
Rosenfeld and Roesler also showed something new in their 2018 study: cohabitation before marriage was associated with a lower risk for divorce in the first year of marriage but higher risk thereafter. They interpreted this finding in light of experience theories, noting that living together before marriage could give couples a leg up at the very start of marriage because there is less of an adjustment to getting married because the moving in together transition has already happened. But they found this advantage to be short-lived. Other factors related to experience may take over from there, such as how cohabitation can increase acceptance of divorce.
Rosenfeld and Roesler’s study caused a stir in the field, and this past December, the Journal of Marriage and Family published two pieces related to their 2018 findings. The first is a comment on the study by Wendy Manning, Pamela Smock, and Arielle Kuperberg and the second is a response by Rosenfeld and Roesler. The articles are illuminating about the complexities of cohabitation and the challenges of studying such effects in social science.
In a prior article on Rosenfeld and Roesler’s 2018 publication, Galena Rhoades and I described the study and competing theories for why living together before marriage can be associated with lower odds of success in marriage (i.e., selection, experience, and inertia). I refer you to that article for more background information than I will get into here about the ways living together might increase risks for some couples.
The Critique by Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg
In their critique, Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg make two primary criticisms of Rosenfeld and Roesler’s study. First, they argue that their statistical models include multiple and confounding measures of time. Their article is an excellent primer on just how many, and how complicated, are the decisions and steps to prepare a data set such as the one used in these papers for such analyses. In both the original study by Rosenfeld and Roesler, and in the critique and response, these family scholars use the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG).
Second, Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg emphasize the important decisions one has to make when using the NSFG about age ranges. Here is just a sample of that complexity:
For example, if one is using the 1988 data to examine marriages dating back to 1970, as Rosenfeld and Roesler do, the experiences of women married in 1970 would represent a narrow age range: women who were 15–44 years old in 1988 but who were 26 years old or younger in 1970. Another age truncation issue is that relatively long marriages cannot be observed with these data without bias toward those that occurred at young ages. For example, a 15-year marriage can only be observed for women who married at age 29 or younger. (p. 3) [i]
This is the basis for their assertion that it is best to limit the analytic sample for this research to marriages of 10 or fewer years duration. In essence, Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg argue that Rosenfeld and Roesler made a number of decisions about the sample and statistical modeling that are inconsistent with the prior literature and not sound. They present further analyses in their response and stand by their claim that the cohabitation effect has disappeared.
Rosenfeld and Roesler’s Reply
Rosenfeld and Roesler state that Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg misinterpreted how time-related variables had been handled in their original study, noting that the authors of the critique could have asked for clarification instead of building arguments around false assumptions. More importantly, they further explain their belief that prior works (along with new analyses by Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg) are based on decisions that leave out 70% of the relevant, available sample. This is primarily the result of that decision to limit the analytic sample to marriages of 10 years or less duration, as noted above. Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg contend that this is standard, best practice when using the NSFG, while Rosenfeld and Roesler argue the decision unnecessarily limits sample and statistical power, causing a data-based bias in favor of finding that there is no longer a divorce risk associated with premarital cohabitation. This is a matter of disagreement that has important implications.
Their reply also makes clear just how methodologically important their prior finding is showing that premarital cohabitation is associated with lower odds of divorce in the first year of marriage but greater odds thereafter. Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg attempted to replicate that finding and did not obtain it (but using options they preferred, not the same set up as Rosenfeld and Roesler). Rosenfeld and Roesler point out that their critique actually does display evidence of this first-year finding, but that the effect was not statistically significant because of the smaller sample. [ii] Thus, Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg do not account for that effect in other models the run. In practice, that is not an unusual decision, but Rosenfeld and Roesler believe that this decision is partly based on the problem they see in restricting the sample based on duration of marriages. Overall, they believe these decisions lead to analyses that are less likely to find the increased risk for divorce.
Filtering out the couples who have been married longer (as MSK do) enhances the Recent Cohort Fallacy because in the very early stages of marriages, premarital cohabitation reduces the risk of marital breakups. (p. 6)
Rosenfeld and Roesler also assert that Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg do not adequately account for the timing of children. They explain that cohabiters are much more likely than non-cohabiters to already have children at the time of marriage, and this difference has nearly doubled over the decades. Thus, cohabiting couples who married in later cohorts were quite a bit more likely than those marrying earlier to already have a child when they married, and the extra stability from having children that has changes by cohorts over the years is another factor that lowers the apparent cohort-based association between cohabitation and divorce. [iii]
Rosenfeld and Roesler’s stand by their conclusion that the average increased risk for divorce associated with premarital cohabitation is mostly unchanged over the last 40 years.
Comment and Implications
As I stated at the outset, most people believe cohabitation should improve one’s odds of marital success. Rosenfeld and Roesler’s work suggests this may only be true very early in marriage. Otherwise, not so much. As ever on this subject, questions abound. Are marital outcomes truly worse for those who live together before marriage, and, if so, for whom? For example, it is less clear that things work the same way, on average, for African Americans who cohabit, and economic disadvantage is deeply embedded in how cohabitation relates to risk in marriage. [iv]
One of the most intriguing questions remains, why is there any association with risk? As Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg note, the long-accepted conclusion in sociology is that differences in marital outcomes based on premarital cohabitation are due to selection—that the added risk is really about who cohabits and who does not. Selection is surely a large part of the story. Of course, on top of that, they argue the risk is no longer evident. Rosenfeld and Roesler disagree.
Although there are strong arguments on each side, I believe Rosenfeld and Roesler get the better of the debate. They make a compelling case for their analytic decisions and findings. Further, they clearly describe how the choices affect the findings (theirs, and that of others). Wherever a family researcher stands on these decisions and debate, the whole matter provides an feast of interesting questions and controversies.
The argument that the overall cohabitation effect will disappear has not been compelling to me, although I have no trouble accepting the possibility. There are two explanations for how the experience of cohabitation might increase risks for some couples, net of selection: changes in attitudes [v] and inertia. My colleague Galena Rhoades and I are leading proponents of the latter theory, which contains no obvious reason to anticipate a negative effect going away for a large subgroup of those who cohabit prior to marriage.
Inertia emphasizes that when two people move in together, all other things being equal, they are making it harder to break up. If so, the state of the relationship, especially at the time of moving together, should matter. Some couples are, in essence, increasing the constraints to remain together (including, for some, on into having children and marrying) prior to dedication being clear, mutual, and high. [vi] We believe that is part of why waiting until marriage, or at least engagement, is associated with lower risk in seven studies. That findings also exists in the NSFG, including one of the papers suggesting the overall cohabitation effect is gone (Manning and Cohen, 2012).
Also, it is worth noting that all of the studies related to the controversy about whether or not the cohabitation effect still exists focus only on the odds of divorce and not on marital quality. In one of our studies, Galena Rhoades and I show that marital quality is lower among those who started living together before engagement or marriage (as inertia theory predicts), and in marriages occurring during the period of time when others have argued that the overall cohabitation effect no longer exists. [vii]
One of the other stories in this controversy is endemic to social science. Researcher degrees of freedom is a concept referring to the fact that the reported findings we end up reading about in social science come at the tail end of a great many consequential decisions by the researchers on matters of data sets, included or excluded variables, and statistical models. Rosenfeld and Roesler make a strong plea for transparency in how researchers make their decisions. They are also circumspect in stating that the extraordinary complexity of changes in marriage and cohabitation in the last five decades make it impossible to account for all that may matter when analyzing and interpreting data on this subject.
There is no simple answer for questions about premarital cohabitation. There is no experiment one can conduct to prove X leads to Y. Would you participate in an experiment where researchers could randomly assigned you to either path A or path B to study the differences in outcomes over the course of your life? Me either. As Rosenfeld and Roesler put it, “. . . all models of complex reality are flawed” (p. 3). Count on that, and count on the interesting saga of research on premarital cohabitation to continuing.
A briefer version of this article was first publish on the site for the Institute for Family Studies, on January 12, 2021. This is the extended version with more detail and more extensive footnotes.
i. These page numbers are those in the advance, online publications of these paper. Once the articles appear in the printed journals, they will have different page numbers.
ii. This is possible because an estimate of an effect can be noisy, having a lot of variability in a sample around whatever average size of effect is obtained.
iii. Although it is true that cohabiting parents are more likely to break up than married parents, including those having children prior to marrying, it is also true that having children makes it more likely a couple will stay together or stay together longer—which makes the matter a big deal in analyzing outcomes related to divorce. Rosenfeld and Roesler argue that the specific way Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg control for children at marriage makes the control variable a proxy for cohabiting before marriage. Because having children before marriage is differentially changing across cohorts, they argue that the net effect favors the overall finding that the cohabitation effect has gone away. Related to this issue of children before marriage, Tach and Halpern-Meekin showed that some portion of the premarital cohabitation effect is driven by premarital cohabiters being more likely to have non-marital births before marriage. One can easily argue that cohabitation and child effects are hopelessly intertwined. Still, either factor can easily be seen to have the same implications for a causal risk of the sort Galena Rhoades and I have focused on, where relationship transitions fit a pattern of the constraints on staying together increase substantially prior to maturing of dedication to be together. Such factors can prematurely create inertia for a relationship to continue when a different path may have seen the relationship end or helped a couple form clearer decisions supporting commitment.
iv. As one example, an important matter running through all these themes is how two people can signal commitment to each other and those around them. Cultural context is important, as I wrote long ago: “I do, by the way, believe that cohabitation can signal higher levels of commitment (compared to not cohabiting) among some who are very poor. I think it likely that the potency of a signal is partially related to what other signals are available. For many complex reasons, marriage is so far off the radar screen in terms of experience for many in poverty that another signal like cohabitation can take on signal value.”
v. This paper by Axinn and Barber in 1997 is one of the most brilliant conceptual pieces in the literature on cohabitation. To me, the arguments are as fresh now as when they were written.
vi. Norval Glenn had made a similar suggestion around the same time we were developing our theory, focusing on the idea that “premature entanglement” foreshortened a solid search for a good match between mates (Glenn, 2002). He and I had dinner at a conference around 2000, and it was quite a delight sharing ideas framed from different theoretical systems (mate selection and search versus commitment theory) that led to similar implications. I also highly recommend this article by Sassler, Addo, and Lichter (2012).
vii. It is a fair point to note that this study of ours, in particular, is based on vastly simpler sample and design (using a random phone sample) than studies using the NSFG. On the other hand, analyses of relationship quality based on cohabitation history in existing marriage have a built-in bias against finding lower marital quality for those who cohabited prior to marriage or engagement. Such samples have already selected out those who divorced and are no longer married (thus, not in the sample), likely biasing tests for differences in marital quality toward non-significance. Still, if you think about either the experience theory of cohabitation or the inertia theory of cohabitation, we see no reason to believe the risk should abate for those who move in together prior to having figured out their intended future.