Before Marriage and After Marriage Part 1

Life is no storybook, but somewhere in the subconscious we lurk a romantic vision of Disney’s Cinderella and Prince Charming. How does the relationship become affected when deciding to a serious commitment?

First, I would like to start off by sharing important statistics on marriage. From Statisticbrain.com, “the number of marriages in 2009 was 2,077,000. The probability that a first marriage will survive 10 years is equal to 1 in 15”. The probability of marriage stood out to me like a sore thumb. It had me think of what couples really meant when they said their vows, “for better or for worse, for richer or for poor, and in sickness and in health. Is it because they are in such a happy moment at the alter on the day of the wedding they were not thinking sickness, death, or poor?

Living Together:
From what I think, it makes sense that couples would choose to live together before committing their entire lives in marriage. Now days more couples move in with each other and cohabit before they decide to become wedded. Thomas Bradbury studies how intimate relationships develop and change.  He wrote a blog titled Testing, Testing: How does living together affect a marriage? And based off Thomas Bradbury’s blog , I saw another perspective.

            “About half of all couples entering their first marriage today live together before marriage… There are at least 10 times as many couple living together today than there were just 30 years ago. (Bumpass & Lu, 2000; Smock, 2000). This is a huge increase when it comes to demographic trends, and the common intuition seems to be: “it’s a great idea to live together first- you can see if you get along before making a serious and life-long commitment”. Contrary to popular wisdom, though, cohabiting relationships tend to be less stable than marriages, and marriages in which people cohabit together prior to the wedding tend to be less stable than those in which partners did not cohabit” (Bardbury).  

How could it be that spending more time with your partner is harmful? I do not see anything bad about living together before a couple decides to be married. Thomas Bradbury’s goes on in his research,

           “There probably isn’t anything wrong. The relationship instability that goes along with cohabitation seems rooted instead in the characteristics of the people who opt to cohabit and in the relationships that they form... Cohabitation is not bad for relationships, but the people who do cohabit are not a random slice of population. Second, high levels of conflict are likely to be inherently detrimental to relationships, and couples’ decisions to live together rather than marry may pivot on how well they are dealing with the differences that are arising between them. So, how much arguing is going on? Why? How does it get resolved? Couples with a lot of unresolved or poorly resolved differences are wise to hesitant, and to put their relationship to the test, given what we know about the harmful effects of mismanaged conflict on the intimate bond that people are hoping to create”.

It is important to have a serious talk with your partner about moving in together. It is also important  to be on the same page as to what the next step means for the relationship, or to have an understanding of expectations. You do not want to eventually move into a marriage with someone who only view living together as an easy to pay the rent, or to get by.

To be continued...