While working on my Proverbs book, I ran into this research - says the opposite of what every young couple thinks - and the media isn’t correcting common myths. It makes perfect sense that a trial ‘marriage’ period would work, so …..
Question what you have heard about Marriage - interesting facts include:
The new marriage norm for American men and women is to marry around 30.
There is good evidence suggesting that religious Americans are less likely to divorce even as they are more likely to marry younger than 30.
Religious marriages in America may be more stable because religion reduces young adults’ odds of cohabiting before marriage, even though it increases their likelihood of marrying at a relatively young age.
By age 35, about 65% of women with a non-religious upbringing had cohabited at least once, versus under 50% of women with a religious upbringing.
In a typical year of life, about 5% of non-religious women ages 18-49 who have not yet married or cohabited will begin a cohabiting union. That figure is nearer 4% for women with a Christian upbringing nearer to 3% for women with a non-Christian religious upbringing (i.e., Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses as well as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and others).
The annual divorce rate among married women with a nonreligious upbringing is around 5%. For religious women, it’s about 4.5%.
Women raised in a religious household who cohabit have very high divorce risks if they marry before age 20, but the lowest risks of any group of women who marry in their 30s.
For women raised in a non-religious home who cohabited before marriage, delaying marriage from the teens into the mid-20s may reduce divorce risk, but delaying marriage into the 30s doesn’t appear to lower the divorce risk at all and may even be associated with a higher risk.
The effect of cohabitation on marriage is indeed statistically significant (premarital cohabitation increases divorce probabilities by about 15%), but the most significant effect religion has on union stability isn’t about what happens once a woman is married, but more about her relationship choices before marriage— while religious people have about a 5% annual marriage dissolution rate, cohabiting couples experience a 26% breakup rate of their cohabitation arrangement.
Summary:
A religious foundation results in less cohabitation before marriage. After marriage, it results in less divorce.
Cohabitation results in a higher divorce rate and a more significant percent of dissolutions of the arrangement before the decision to marry has ever been reached.
Next time a young couple says they will live together to make sure they are compatible, tell them that it may do the opposite. But, they will not listen to you…it is a perceived truth in our society and no amount of real data will change this. Maybe an exercise is better - have them find ten couples in their circle who cohabited before eventual marriage and summarize the actual data - don’t forget to collect how many cohabitation relationships went bad before their eventual marriage.
And, tell them to start attending a local church of their preference - that will go over well!
Pondering…why do cohabiting people get married? Tax reasons, society? If the delay is a good thing, why not just make it permanent? I suspect that this is where we will be (or are) heading.
Very interesting and well done