Isabel Sawhill on Single Parents, on NPR 6-12

In my last post, I wrote about the remarkable editorial by Isabel Sawhill a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Post.  She was a guest on NPR's show today, Talk of the Nation, with Neal Conan.  Also on the show was Phil Cohen, a sociologist who I've mentioned in prior blogs and who has included comments from me on a couple of his blogs.

I don't agree with every point made on the show (particularly about the nature of the Healthy Marriage Initiatives in the past 10 years) but the points discussed about families and the difficulties of single parents are outstanding. One of the points that comes through so strongly is how difficult it is for children, even with great single parents, when it comes to getting the time and attention they need. They discuss complex issues related to child care and dating and a number of other things.

Isabel Sawhill makes the most important point, in my view, by bringing the discussion back--several times--to how important it is to help the next generation delay having children until other things are settled, especially a clear, committed relationship between two people who want to raise children together.  We usually call that marriage, as she points out, but she gets to the same point I made in my last post. The reason children have an edge when their parents are married before they have children is that commitment questions between these two parents-to-be got settled before the children were in the mix.  No guarantees but it greatly ups the odds. Sawhill gets it that the battle here is for the next generation in terms of prevention.That means things happening to help people before they are in this spot (and also, hopefully, more thoughtful discussions about how to help people best who are already in this spot). 

Before, Before, Before. Before. 

Have a listen (or read) at NPR Talk of the Nation.

(Bill Coffin, thank you for the heads up!)

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A Distinguished Family Researcher Notes: “20 years later, it turns out Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown and unmarried moms”

This post continues on the theme I’ve been recently focused on regarding signals of commitment.

Isabel Sawhill, an economist and senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, is one of the most distinguished family scientists of our era.  Because of her stature, people will take serious note of her editorial in the Washington Post that appeared on May 25th, 2012. As she noted, it is the 20th anniversary of one of the greatest outbreaks ever of the cultural debate about single parenthood. In her piece, she stated that Dan Quayle was, in fact, right in the assertion that there are enormous societal consequences to the dramatic increase in the number of children who are not born to married parents.

To quote from her write-up:  Twenty years later, Quayle’s words seem less controversial than prophetic. The number of single parents in America has increased dramatically: The proportion of children born outside marriage has risen from roughly 30 percent in 1992 to 41 percent in 2009. For women under age 30, more than half of babies are born out of wedlock. A lifestyle once associated with poverty has become mainstream. The only group of parents for whom marriage continues to be the norm is the college-educated.

Sawhill listed three main causes for concern, all of which I’d remind my readers can be qualified by stating, “on average”: (1) marriage is a commitment that cohabitation is not; (2) marriage is good for children; and (3) marriage brings economic benefits.

I encourage you to read her entire piece. I suspect her main motivation in putting forth her thoughts on this, right at this time, is reflected in the final line of her op-ed, where she commented that we may be approaching the point where the current trend becomes irreversible.

Before going further, I’ll say what so many people often do in this context--and this is important. No one that I know well who is seriously involved, concerned, and paying attention to these issues is saying that single parents—and/or less committed parents—are bad or inherently poor parents. In fact, many single parents are amazing if not heroic. It’s not some cheap cliché to make this point. Furthermore, many who parent alone did not plan on doing so. And some I know who did, in fact, plan exactly on that path are great parents. But Sawhill is getting at the nub of the larger, societal question, which is about the fact that we are heading toward a future where massive numbers of children are not going to have the benefit of being raised by their own two, committed parents.

I understand the motivations and data from which people will take issue with Sawhill’s arguments as well as those of many others who dare to suggest that marriage is the best context, on average, for raising children. But the real heart of this whole issue is about commitment and signals. Why does marriage matter for child-welfare? Married couples that have children together have the commitment-sequencing thing working in their favor. More the point, so do their children. These couples have a decided, clarified, and publicly given evidence  of commitment to the future prior to becoming parents together. That does not make them perfect parents but it does make them pre-qualified on commitment in some substantial degree. It’s sort of like people who are shopping for a house who have already secured their mortgage--they are pre-qualified to buy a house within a certain economic range.  Their commitment to the process is already vetted; once they find the right house, they are ready to follow-through. This type of process matters even more for homes than it does for houses--and it matters more for families than for dwellings.

What really increases the chances of children being raised by two parents who are committed to them is that, for some children, those two parents were strongly committed to each other beforehand. And that is another example of how signals about commitment can make a difference with important life outcomes.

(If you want to go down memory lane, here’s a link to my blog about our finding that having a baby together does not predict remaining together [at least up to a year later, in our national sample of unmarrieds]. Yet, things like having a shared gym membership, or shared cell plan, or vacation plans together, do predict remaining together.  Find it here.)

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Give Me a Sign! What Should LoLo and Tebow Look For?

You may have noticed, I think correctly “reading” the signs of commitment in a potential long-term partner/mate is crucial. This is most important earlier on, of course, prior to “settling down” with someone.  Hence, while reading commitment accurately can be useful in marriage or engagement, what I'm really focused on here are those who are dating (or hanging out—I realize fewer people “date” anymore, but you know what I mean).  To clarify further, this whole issue is most important in situations where at least one partner wants to know if the relationship they are in right now has a future. (There are a lot of other posts here about this. I’m going to be more abstract here and then get back to practical in future posts.)

What’s a good signal of commitment? 

Some of the characteristics of good signals of commitment (or commitment potential) are these:

1.  Does the behavior actually relate to something about commitment? For example, if you read my last few posts, you know that there is good reason to believe that someone’s desire to have sex with you may mean nothing about commitment.  I hope that is not a shocking idea to anyone reading this, but people do too often “see” desire and infer commitment. Let’s call that “relationship reading dyslexia.”  What’s on the page does not match what got into the brain. 

Ditto if someone says, “I want to make a baby with you” with no other evidence of commitment like, say, marriage. An even worse indicator of commitment is if someone says to you, “I’d like you to have my baby.” Hm. Context matters a lot here.  It may sound silly to you that I even raise this example, but this is, in fact, a relatively common behavior in some teenager groups, where some males say some version of this to females they are interested in, and some females may be flattered and impressed, and . . . . . Don’t be that male or that female, and help your kids understand this. By the way, while I’d like to see people hold out for a lot more than this, it would be somewhat more impressive if someone said, “I want to raise a child with you.” That statement contains a much greater amount of information, especially if it’s accurate.    

2.  Is the behavior under the control of the one doing it—whatever it is? For behavior to have meaning about commitment, it must be behavior that the person has control over performing. There are tons of extensions of this point. A shotgun wedding has less information in it about the commitment level of the participants than other weddings. As I mentioned in the last post, saying “I love you” contains less information about commitment if it’s in the context of a hormonal rush of chemicals—when the chemistry is driving the bus. Chemistry is fun but it’s not a great bus driver, and some relationships are windy mountain roads without guardrails.   

Just ask LoLo how hard it is to keep the bus on the road!  She has her will and her values and her goal, and she has her chemistry.  Just how great would the gravitational pull be between Tebow and LoLo at this point? How much does a super strong impulse impact volitional choice? And, how well can volitional choice resist the pull of behavior that’s not consistent with one’s values?

3.  Signals contain more information when there are more options. When you have more options to choose among, what you pick tells me more about who you are.

I was inspired to think about this by economists. You don’t usually see the words “inspiring” and “economist” in the same sentence, so if you are an economist, enjoy this moment. I try to avoid being totally infected by their dismal realities but they do get some things right (and they have mad math skills, which must count for something).  [Yes, I added the italics to the word “count” for those who have deficient pun receptors.]

Put another way, when a person has diminished options, what he or she chooses contains less information about true preferences.

Think about buying toilet paper in 7-11.  I’m not even sure they have it, but let’s suppose they do. It will be one brand, and in one roll quantities, and it will likely cost you 4 bucks a roll.  7-11 is a great chain of stores but they excel at convenience not low price or variety (except for pop and candy bars and such. They are my “go to” supplier of Junior Mints.). What does this mean? If you badly need a roll of toilet paper (not so badly that you are just heading for a restroom, if they have a public one), you’ll take what they have and forego your desire to get the Charmin Ultra Soft you might normally prefer. You’ll take the individually wrapped roll of Scott’s (my favorite brand, actually, and how far wrong can you go with that brand? Slight over-share there.).

Anyway, with limited options, your choice represents less about your preferences. And that goes for commitment, too. With fewer options, what you choose reflects less about volition and preference, so what you choose may not mean you have much commitment to that choice. 

How’s this apply to dating and mating? Anything that constrains your options limits the information contained in the choices you make.  In their romantic lives, some people are shopping in 7-11 rather than Safeway.  Some do so by their own actions or past behavior, and some because they truly have poorer quality options in life. More importantly, some people are routinely misinterpreting the behavior of their partners, and thinking things signal commitment that just don’t. 

Okay, enough for now. More on implications of signals in the near future.  (That’s signaling my intention, btw.)

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Love Me, Love Me Knot: "I thought you loved me!"

I came across this study described in a little write up on the Science of Relationships blog, by Samantha Joel.  An excellent summary on an excellent blog. 

Samantha Joel describes a study published last year (2011) by Joshua Ackerman, Vladas Griskevicius, and Norman Li.  This follows up perfectly from my last post, where I suggested that, on average, it was more critical for women to get clear signals about commitment from men than vice versa as relationships are progressing—or potentially progressing.  This is because women have a lot more at risk simply because they can become pregnant and have babies and men do not.

A lot of commitment dynamics and commitment decoding issues are tied up in that simple biological fact above.  I’ve discussed the importance of this in numerous places.  The findings of Ackerman, Griskevicius, and Li fit perfectly within this thinking.  They use some pretty complex evolutionary and economic theory to make their key points, but I can distill it down pretty clearly for the current themes on my blog:   

On average (it’s always on average, remember that!):

1.  Men tend to express love in a new romantic relationship before women do.

2.  Most people believe it’s the other way around.

3.  Men and women have different emotional reactions to the expression of love before versus after having sex. 

A couple of quotes from the research paper make the important points rather well:

            A presex confession may signal interest in advancing a relationship to include sexual activity,whereas a postsex confession may instead more accurately signal a desire for long-term commitment. (p. 1090)

          On the face of it, this reaction appears to suggest that men are quite interested in early commitment. However, after the onset of sex in a relationship, men exhibited somewhat less positivity to confessions of love. (p. 1090)

LOVE ME, LOVE ME KNOT, LOVE ME NOT

Feelings of feeling in love—and, more importantly, expressions—can be affected by the desire to have sex. That’s why when an immediate desire to have sex with the possibility of having sex make for a confusing picture regarding signals of true long-term interest and commitment.  So, for someone interested in deeper commitment and/or tying the knot, “love me, love me not” decision situations are pretty critical.  Does it mean someone wants to become more intertwined—knotted, if you will—just because he or she says they love you?

As I’ve talked in numerous posts and writings, signals about commitment are a really big deal in understanding what’s going on in relationships. If you are looking at a signal that has little signal value related to what you are trying to discern, you can misread the situation by a wide margin.  And I do think there are fewer clearer signals related to commitment in developing relationships than their used to be.  I’ll talk about Facebook pretty soon, as something pretty interesting has emerged there in this regard—and if you are in the zone of life dealing with all these things personally, you know where I’ll head on that. 

I will end by asking a similar question to the one in the last post. What truly signals commitment? What do you think?  What are you sure of? Does it work the same way for you as for others you might be romantically interested in?  That’s something it may be worth being less sure about.

If you want to read more, two of my (our) papers get pretty far into this whole issue of both signaling issues related to commitment and differences that may often matter related to either gender and/or personality attachment styles.  So, if you want to go deeper, have at it.  Here are links to two papers. 

Our journal article on commitment, signals, attachment, and the formation of commitment:

"Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3039217/?tool=pubmed

My article on men and commitment and why men resist marriage but say they value it more (on average) than women.

"What is it with Men and Commitment, Anyway?"

https://www.box.com/s/1zketqdii1ccnqb5vlf9

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Rings, Signals, Sex, and Babies

[There is an updated version of this post at my Psychology Today blog, here.]

Plain gold ring on his finger he wore

It was where everyone could see

He belonged to someone, but not me

On his hand was a plain gold ring

            Lyrics to “Plain Gold Ring”

by George Stone (performed by Nina Simone, recently, by Kimbra)

I’ll come back to these lyrics by the end of this post. 

Last time, I left you with a question:  Should Tyra keep the engagement ring she got from Sam?

My answer is, “yes.”  Tyra clearly feels like she lost something of value to her with Sam breaking off the long engagement—time wasted on her biological clock. In this particular case, the value of the engagement ring is in line with how they came to be commonly used in the US over the past decades:  A promise by a male to a female of following through on the intention to marry. The reason that I feel like the economics writer I noted last time (O’Brian) was wrong about it no longer makes much sense for a female to keep a ring if an engagement ends is that there is one thing that has not changed—biology. Women are the ones who get pregnant.  Yes, there was that one exception and maybe a few others, but . . . ..  Women are also the ones who bear children (goes with the whole pregnant thing).  Lastly, with a growing number of exceptions, women are still far more likely to be the ones who spend the most time on child care. 

Biology affects societal and cultural trends and customs.  This aspect of biology makes women, on average, more vulnerable than men to things going wrong in dating, mating, marriage, and family development. This is why it has been widely recognized that, ON AVERAGE (meaning, there are many exceptions), it’s more critical for females to properly decode the commitment levels of men, early on, than vice versa.  Some aspects of advances for women in careers and earnings counter this, but there is still not way to wipe out the fundamental differences that begin with who can and who cannot have a baby.

While the use of customs to clarify commitment seems to me to be waning, there is a perfectly good rationale for the existence of societal customs that require romantic partners, male or female, to produce clear signals of commitment as a relationship progresses. Further, it’s most crucial that those who stand to lose more if things go South protect themselves by getting the clearest evidence of commitment that’s possible and appropriate for a relationship stage from their partners. Sacrifices made by one for another are one of the clearer kinds of signals one can get about commitment. However, these run more risk of being misinterpreted. Another would be societally sanctioned emblems of public commitment: for example, the engagement ring, Facebook status designations and so forth.

Back to the sexism of biology for a moment: I think there could be a further biological bias in the mix here that makes it harder for the one who is most committed to see accurately how committed a partner is.  Women (and, no doubt some men) have more active oxytocin systems than their partners, and this propels sacrificing behaviors that may be, unfortunately, not shared.  To make a good thing worse, oxytocin can boost trust, but that does not mean it’s boosting trust according to facts.

Looking for lasting love? Here is some advice related to these themes. 

1.  If you can become pregnant, it’s especially important for you to look for, and wait for, clear evidence of a mutual commitment to the future before allowing yourself to get too deeply drawn in.  That’s why there has, historically, been some protection in marriage compared to things like cohabiting (especially without engagement); there is no doubt about what is meant to be signaled with public declarations such as engagement and marriage.  To be the most protective, that evidence of your partner’s commitment should be seen clearly by you and others. (Which also means that a person might have to be more careful when public signals are hard to come by.)

Some of you may be thinking, “hey Scott, what do you mean by ‘if you can become pregnant?’” 

Simply this: Is it biologically possible for you to become pregnant?  You may or not be intending to have sex and/or you may be using birth control.  Birth control methods have failure rates.  So do intentions not to have sex.   

2.  Whether or not you can become pregnant, do you attach strongly to people, quickly? If that’s you, you also are at greater risk from not looking for cues about commitment. Your own desire for connection, along with the power of oxytocin, can make you misread the signals about how committed a partner is to you.  Lots of people find out, painfully, that they were “over-giving” to a partner who was never going to become more seriously committed.  Kinda of gives “over-share” a whole new definition.

3.  Think about the markers that you think should give you valid evidence about the commitment level of a partner in a relationship that is progressing. What do you think you need to see? Give some serious weight to what you might look for that is public.  Public displays of commitment beat the snot out of private, ambiguous messages and hints about commitment.  DTRs are nice, but it takes a lot of skill and guts to do them right.  So, it’s good to have clear ideas about what else to look at to decode commitment. 

The haunting lyrics from Plain Gold Ring, posted at the outset here, get what I’m going after as the most protective.  It is an example of an emblem of commitment that is so unambiguous that partners and outsiders know exactly where things stand.   

4.  If you have a friend or two that seems really wise and knows you well, share what you are thinking and see if they can knock some holes in your ideas about correctly decoding commitment.  Love is blind but does not have to be. 

Here are some links to older posts of mine that are directly related to these themes: 

Decoding commitment

http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2010/10/decoding-commitment-when-sally-met.html

Is Roulette what You are Playing?

http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2009/08/hand-held-hand-played.html

Having the Talk:  DTR I

http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2009/05/dtr-dance-avoiding-talk-i-wrote-in.html

Having the Talk:  DTR II

http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2009/05/dtr-part-ii.html

Oxytocin and Commitment 

http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2010/03/relationship-development-and-oxytocin.html

Kimbra (amazing new singer coming out of New Zealand) has a wonderful YouTube of Plain Gold Ring, if you are interested.  Here

Rings True

[There is an update version of this post at my Psychology Today blog, here.]  

              If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it
Beyonce, Single Ladies

Is Beyonce’s famous line sexist or what? What does it mean to put a ring on it? What if you put a ring on it and then wanted the ring off it? That's my focus here, but I'll  come back to other aspects soon.

Do you ever wonder about how certain cultural rituals developed? While marriage is a worldwide phenomenon, the customs around it vary tremendously by culture and era.  If I had another professional life to live, I could enjoy being an anthropologist studying marriage and family. Let’s talk today about engagement rings and a recent story in the news about their history.

While engagement ring customs are not universal, there are universal aspects of marriage customs that govern various factors related to marriage such as courtship, rules about betrothal, and rules about how and if a marriage can end. The customs vary but they often have a lot to do with assuring true intention to follow-through and provisions for the security of a union that is the basis, often, for a family as well as the joining of two families (the latter still being considered very important in many parts of the world).  

Especially in an era where marriages are founded around the principles of intimacy and deeper connection, a central role that commitment plays is to secure romantic attachment. When there is intense attachment to another but unclear commitment, it makes most people anxious about the potential loss of the partner. When commitment is clear and working well between two partners, it promotes safety in the connection and the future of the relationship. People relax and invest when there is safety and clarity in commitment.

Therefore, some customs around romantic relationships represent emblems of commitment and they serve the function of signaling security in commitment.  Enter the ritual of engagement rings.

Matthew O’Brien at the Atlantic writes about business and economics, and recently wrote a piece about engagement rings that a friend noted I’d be interested in. So right. The piece is entitled, “The Strange (and Formerly Sexist) Economics of Engagement Rings.”  It’s an excellent little piece. O’Brien notes the degree to which this custom took hold was propelled in our culture by a marketing campaign by N. W. Ayers on behalf of DeBeer’.  This is fascinating, though it makes me feel about as warm and fuzzy as knowing that greeting card companies started some commemorative days I am emotionally attached to and celebrate. By the way, did I tell you when World Commitment-Related-Blog Day is? It’s coming up, but I have not set the exact date. I have to design a line of digital cards, first, that you can send to friends through my site here, for a fee, of course.  If you’d rather just keep your schedule free from another day where something is celebrated, just send me 5 bucks and forget the card. US funds are preferred.  Old diamond rings, no longer being used, are acceptable as well.

O’Brien points out that there used to be laws about the breach of a promise to marry (similar to how their used to be laws about the breach of promises made in marriage).  These laws allowed women to sue men for failing to follow through on marriage plans. Apparently, since even many decades ago, it was not uncommon for a couple to have sex before marriage, and virginity was highly prized when one became married, males could be forced to compensate females for reducing their value by having sex with them but failing to follow through on the promised marriage (which often became the pretext for the sex happening in the first place).  Note the logic here. Women were more likely to give something of value to men in the context of the male promising commitment to the future.

You may have noticed that times have changed in a few respects here. O’Brien cites work by a legal scholar Margaret Brinig that supports the idea that the engagement ring (expensive engagement rings—with Diamonds, thanks to DeBeers’) became an actual custom performing the same function as the breach of promise laws once those laws started to disappear. So, the legal obligation was replaced in some parts of society with an economic promise of forfeiture should a male promised to a woman not fulfill the promise to marry. Hence began the custom that a woman keeps the ring if the man bails. These days, you’ll see plenty of debates in advice columns about if and when a ring should be returned based on how a marriage has been called off.  O’Brien seems to think this debate is over, but I’m not so sure it is. He considers it somewhat obvious that the woman would give the ring back to a man who did not follow-through on a promise to marry.

All of this raises some interesting questions.  Let’s deal with a few here and then I’ll continue in the next post.

Q:  Why don’t women, historically, give something expensive to the man in case she changes her mind? Is this sexist in the pejorative sense of sexist-bad? Is this sexist in some rationale sense, whether one wants to think it good or bad, related to differences in men and women?  (I’ll come back to this in another post, but have fun thinking about it.)

Q: In the following vignette, should Tyra give the ring back to Sam?

Sam and Tyra started dating when they met at age 26. They got engaged at age 27, and he gave her a really nice ring.  Now they are 32. So, the engagement has gone on for 5 years.  I think this is a new trend, by the way, long engagements. For some, endless engagements reflect a desire to tell others they, as a couple, are more committed than average but it’s not as much a plan to marry as a way to signal this higher level of commitment to others—“we’re off the market but we may never really walk the aisle.”

Anyway, Sam and Tyra are now 32, have been cohabiting for 4 years, and they are still engaged.  Sam starts to fall for a woman at work, and the gravitational pull toward this new woman just grows and grows.  After some anguish and a lot of effort to work through untangling their lives, he achieves enough escape velocity to move on.  (See recent, prior notes on inertia!)

Tyra is feeling VERY burned. Of course, the burning could have happened just as easily either direction, but in this case, Tyra felt that the engagement and the cohabiting were sure signs they were going to get married. She plans to keep the ring and she wishes it were bigger still.  In his article, O’Brien suggest that women would/should generally give rings back in this day an age because are increasingly likely to be the ones with the good jobs, and therefore, do not really need the collateral of the ring. While not stated, I would imagine he and many others these days would also not consider Tyra to have given anything more away than Sam has by them having sex and no longer being virgins. It is an interesting question to consider, though, if she was risking more, even in this, and how that is the case.  Again, maybe something I'll get into in the next post.

At any rate, Tyra doesn’t feel like Sam owes her for her no longer being a virgin. She feels that was pretty mutual and not something to blame him about. And while she's deeply hurt about him leaving her for another woman, that's not the biggest reason she feels he owes here, either. She feels Sam owes her for wasting time on her biological clock. You might say she is "ticked" off. Tyra wants children and Tyra wants a nuclear family to raise those children in. Tyra has read a great deal about the biological clock and knows well what her odds are and how they have already changed, and what time might be left on the ticking biological clock. Tyra does believe she has lost something of value because she’s lost some of her window on one of her most deeply held life goals.

Does Tyra keep the ring? Should they have talked about the meaning of the ring in the first place, and what happens if what if happens?

Next up, a post on sexism and commitment and babies.  Should be fun.  I promise you, and if I have your number, I’ll give you a ring when I post it.

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Here We Go Again: More Passionate Debating about Cohabiting before Marriage!

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You might take some time looking at the latest dustup about cohabiting before marriage. These fracases used to come up about once a year, then maybe twice a year. I think they are getting more frequent.

The current, new energy around this topic was generated by an editorial in The Sunday New York Times, written by a clinical psychologist (Meg Jay), entitled: “The Downside of Cohabiting Before Marriage.” Go ahead and read it or skim it. Then come back. You might need to Google it as the NYTs seems to have a way of making the link not work.

Those of you who know our work will recognize how much Meg Jay’s piece hovers around the points we make and our findings at the University of Denver. She is primarily drawing attention to the underappreciated downside to cohabitation. In our work, we call this inertia, noting that the inertia of living together makes is harder to break up than dating without living together. If you want a quick summary of the concept of inertia as we describe and study it, see my post from last week, just below. If you want a sense of the research we (Galena Rhoades and I along with our colleague Howard Markman) have been doing, see the document here. That’s for those of you who want to more deeply absorb our research and the place of it in the empirical literature surrounding these debates.

Back to The New York Times and this cultural moment. I’ll share some links with you where people are reacting to Meg Jay’s piece, and then I’ll make a few comments about each.

Natasha Burton’s: Cohabitation-Divorce Link? I Don't Think So.

1. First off, note her utter certainty about the research, that there is no link between cohabitation before marriage and how marriages do. She suggests this is a debunked idea, so move on. In fact, she links to another blog for more depth on that point (Hanna Rosin’s, here). Note that the research in question focuses only on divorce as an outcome. We show variations of the cohabitation effect (really, the “before mutual plans for marriage” cohabitation effect) in numerous published studies, including in recent samples, particularly on dimension of relationship quality. I also think the divorce effect still exists, but a little less clearly than in the past. There are complex issues about research in play there, which I’ll skip for now. The main point here is that we find that cohabiting before engagement is associated with, on average, lower relationship quality in marriage. The whole reason this is interesting is because of the main point Meg Jay makes—that cohabitation has a downside. In our work, we call it inertia.

2. Burton is dismissive of Jay’s points based on her own belief that the issues being raised are settled matters in social science (which is not true). Jay's points are more consistent with a lot of empirical evidence than Burton realizes.

3. Ironically, Burton falls back on what she criticizes in Jay without apparently noticing it: using anecdotal evidence, but from her own life. She describes her own process of cohabiting in ways I would consider unusually careful and deliberate. In our national sample of cohabiters, we find that 2/3rds describe something more like sliding than deciding in terms of how they began to cohabit. Burton's personal anecdote amounts to showing that she is a decider, yet, this is not remotely what most people actually do. In implying the importance of it, Burton shows substantial agreement with points Jay makes toward the end of her editorial but she gives Jay no credit on this score or any other.

4. Burton references Hannah Rosin’s blog. Rosin notes, rightly I think, that the biggest “train wreck” coming next may be the rise in serial cohabitation. She points out that this pattern is linked to poverty and other background risk factors. Nevertheless, I think this emerging trend has huge implications for children and that it will become common regardless of social strata.

What often seems lost in these discussions are simple things. Serial cohabitation becomes serial because a first cohabitation ended and a second one began, with perhaps others to follow. While there is selection in play (meaning prior risks are involved in the total risk), what a person who's had one cohabiting relationship end does next has to have some influence on their cumulative risk. At times, people talk about selection in this area of research as if they truly do not believe that there is a single thing such a person can do to lower their risks--the risks are just baked in and that's just too bad. Sure, the point is never, ever said harshly like that; but the implication of the thinking is harsh, deterministic, and hopeless.

What if such a person, despite the odds stacked against them, chooses to go slowly and decide if, when, and how they were to cohabit again rather than just sliding into the next round of cohabiting? Maybe especially "what if" if they have children. Is that a crazy idea? For those of you will jump right into the poverty issue on all of this, noting how much more challenging for people in poverty, I want to say, "of course it's more challenging if you are in poverty." But maybe it's especially important to think about the decisions one does have control over when one has the fewest options of all.

This next piece by Anna Weaver, entitled Should Couples Be Wary of Cohabitation? recognizes one of the main points that Meg Jay was driving toward.

1. Anna Weaver focuses on a key point Meg Jay made: “Whether you agree with premarital cohabitation or not, Jay's point is well-taken. Before you combine utilities or your coffee mug collections, how about a little discussion of where this all is leading?”

2. It seems to me that people have to be pretty stridently offended by any sense that there could be a downside to cohabiting before marriage (or before engagement) to react the way some seem to react to a piece like Meg Jay’s. Anna Weaver is not offended; she gets the obvious point.

One more blog to check on here today. And thank you, Bill Coffin, for pointing me to so many of these today.

Check out this piece on a blog called “Cheap Talk,” entitled Living Together Before Marriage Leads To Divorce?

The author of this entry, Jeff, writes: “Does this make any sense? Isn’t a couple who goes straight to the sliding in before getting married ultimately just as locked in as a couple who completely abstains from sliding in until they are locked in by the bonds of wedlock?”

I can’t tell who Jeff is, but he understands something about the research in this area and something about selection. He does not seem to me to be aware of a lot of research, but some.

I think Jeff’s argument gets close to the whole point but misses the critical part. There are many types of relationship situations that are more constrained than others: cohabiting is more constrained than dating, most of the time, and marriage is more constrained than cohabiting, most of the time. I think this is the crucial piece too many people don't see clearly about cohabiting compared to dating. Now, add the fact that most couples slide into cohabiting. That means people are often giving up options before making a choice. That’s part of why being married or at least engaged before cohabiting can matter to how things turn out. (Again, we find this over and over again in our studies.) Back to Jeff. When a couple gets married, everyone realizes that their marriage may not last and could even be disastrous. But in marrying, everyone also knows that the two people are choosing to be more constrained together rather than sliding into more constraint. The decision precedes the big increase in constraints. Sliding into cohabitation is something different, entirely. That's too often the whole point, of course; one or both partners may not be ready to make a deeper commitment and sliding avoids confronting this issue. Of course, that turns out particularly badly if one partner is pretty committed and only finds out later that the other never was. There is a reason--a serious reason--why the book "He's Just Not That Into You" has been a bestseller.

To be fair about the research, many couples slide and do fine. In fact, in this current dustup, there are countless comments from folks pinned to the various articles around the web about how it all turned out fine for them and they have been married for X number of years. That's good for them. It’s just that the odds of it not turning out so fine go up when we take lightly transitions of any sort that increases constraints when we are not even noticing how that is happening. The less clarity there is about what cohabiting is and what it means for a couple (either because they are not already married or engaged, or they have not talked about it openly and clearly), the more risk there is of getting stuck. Some couples get stuck a long time, and you can see it in their lower marital quality. And I'm not even raising, right now, the issues of how children are involved. See a few posts back if you want to bring that issue into the mix, here.

It doesn't seem to me to be all that radical to raise questions about why cohabiting does not always work out the way people think it will. Or maybe it is? People sure get energized about this topic. Compounding all this, media arguments about cohabitation often pretend to be centered on science. But the science here is very complex, and patterns and risks vary such that different people have different risks related to the same behaviors. None of the references to the science on cohabitation in all the stories I have seen this week show any kind of sophistication in understanding the research or the phenomena. It's like we, as a culture, are the couple that can't talk clearly about what's really happening when we begin to cohabit, so we slide.

For those of you who are skeptical of there being any issues of risk involved in how Americans cohabit before marriage, just how far do you want to go to argue that there is nothing worth pondering in all this? How believable is it, really, that it just does not matter how or when or why a person enters a relationship pattern that can make it harder to break-up?

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