Pre-marital cohabitation endangers your marriage

By Charles Foster

Marriage is not well served by its defenders. The loudest and best reported of them are often fundamentalist bigots. It’s a shame, for marriage has a lot going for it.

Even if you think that marriage is an anachronistic/bourgeois/theologically contaminated institution, you’ll probably agree that the breakdown of marriages is best avoided. Of course incurably dysfunctional marriages should be ended, but most people aspire to enduring relationships, and the wrench of marital dislocation is emotionally and financially traumatic. If there are children, marriage breakup is painful for the parents and can be enduringly damaging for the children. There are, in short and quite uncontroversially, some significant harms associated with the breakdown of marriages.

How can marriage breakdown – and hence those harms – be avoided?

Many, many factors of course contribute to marriage failure. But there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that pre-marital cohabitation decreases the quality of marriage and increases the odds of divorce. A meta-analysis (2010)¹ came to the following conclusions:

Marital stability: (16 studies): ‘…premarital cohabitors had significantly lower rates of staying married compare to non-cohabitors…[T]he data suggest that premarital cohabitation is negatively associated with subsequent marital stability…’²

Marital quality: (12 studies): ‘…cohabitation before marriage is modestly negatively associated with subsequent marital quality.’³

Spencer James and Brett Beattie summarized the consensus as follows:

‘….results generally [supported] the proposition that, on average, cohabitors tend to report poorer marital quality and experience greater marital instability than those who move directly into marriage.’⁴

But why? And are these merely correlations, or is pre-marital cohabitation causative of subsequent problems? Several studies have tried to answer these questions.

The obvious question is whether the premaritally cohabiting group is materially different from the non-cohabiting cohort – with those differences (rather than the fact of cohabitation) being responsible for the differences in marital quality and stability.

The detailed answer is complex. But the headline answer, I suggest, is not. James and Beattie examined three factors contributing to marital instability: marital conflict, marital happiness and marital communication.⁵ So far as marital conflict is concerned, they found ‘no evidence that selection into cohabitation [ie the phenomenon of different cohorts opting or not opting for cohabitation] is associated with marital conflict, net of the experience of cohabitation.’⁶ Marital happiness was rather different: ‘….the experience of cohabitation is again significantly and negatively related to happiness, with cohabitors reporting somewhat lower happiness than those who married directly. In contrast to conflict, however, selection into cohabitation here exerts a significant negative effect.’⁷ So far as marital communication is concerned, cohabitation ‘appears to exert a negative effect…’ In relation to two out of the three factors, therefore, it was cohabitation itself, rather than the pre-marital characteristics of the cohabitators, that seemed to be important.

There is, of course, more work to be done in establishing causation. But some of the methodological objections to these conclusions were addressed (to my eyes convincingly) by James and Beattie There was a small but statistically significant negative effect of cohabitation on marital quality.

Many of the studies referred to above had several (expressly acknowledged) methodological difficulties. Perhaps the most fundamental is that they took a snapshot: they looked at the reported marital quality (and so on) just at the moment that it was reported by the study subject, rather than appreciating that views change over time.⁹

This problem was averted in a recent paper from Spencer L. James, who, using a sequential cohort design, examined data from 35 years of marriage.¹⁰ This is a paper about marital quality rather than the probability of divorce, but, unsurprisingly, the link between low quality marriages and divorce is well documented.¹¹ He was interested in the trajectories of marital happiness, communication and conflict. He examined a large number of variables, and so was able to adjust for variables such as the number of children, household income, race, age at marriage, employment, and so on, which in some previous studies had obscured the role of pre-marital cohabitation.

In relation to marital happiness, he identified two groups. The first (66% of his sample) was the ‘High Decline’ group (‘HD’). The subjects in this group started their married lives relatively happily (about half a standard deviation above the overall mean), but this initial happiness declined moderately, in a linear way, as the marriage went on.

The second was the ‘Low Rebound’ (‘LR’) group. They were significantly less happy from the start of the marriage than the members of the HD (about half a standard deviation below them). Their marriages were also much less stable than those in the HD: they had very significant declines in their marital happiness over time – significantly more than the decline in the HD. After about 20 years of marriage their happiness had diminished by more than a standard deviation, although subsequently it recovered modestly (hence the ‘rebound’).

Those in the LR had, predictably, a higher chance of divorce than those in the HD.

It is better to be in HD than LR. And women in the LR were more likely to have cohabited premaritally than those in the HD. This was consistent with previous work done by Spencer James¹²which similarly sought to avoid the ‘snapshot’ objection that had compromised some other studies.

The picture isn’t yet complete. We can quibble about some of the methodology. But it is clear enough that pre-marital cohabitation is a risk factor for marital instability and divorce. The risk is of a grave injury, and seems to be sufficiently large, that, were it a risk of surgery, any competent surgeon would be expected to warn the patient of it.

Even if I’ve overstated the effect of the studies, the precautionary principle should make you cautious of pre-marital cohabitation.

References

1. Jose A, O’Leary D and Moyer A (2010) Does pre-martial cohabitation predict subsequent marital stability and marital quality? A meta-analysis. Journal of Marriage and Family 72: 105-116
2. ibid 109-110
3. ibid 111-112
4. James SL and Beattie BA (2012) Reassessing the link between women’s premarital cohabitation and marital quality. Social Forces 91(2): 635-662, 636
5. ibid
6. ibid, 652
7. ibid 652
8. ibid 654-656
9. Smock P.J. (2000) Cohabitation in the United States: An appraisal of research themes, findings and implications. Annual Review of Sociology 26: 1-20
10. James SL (2015) Variation in trajectories of women’s marital quality. Social Science Research 49: 16-30
11. Huston TL, Caughlin JP, Houts RM, Smith SE, George LJ (2001) The connubial crucible: newlywed years as predictors of marital delight, distress and divorce. J. Pers Soc Psychol 80: 237-252
12. Spencer James (2014) Longitudinal patterns of women’s marital quality: the case of divorce, cohabitation and race-ethnicity: Marriage and Family Review, 50(8):738-763