Cohabitation?

Contrary to expectations, although more than four out of five couples in Britain choose to live together before getting married, marriage remains the most likely eventual long-term choice made by cohabiting couples.

Around three in five couples who stop cohabiting decide to get married, while less than two in five separate, so marriage is still the preferred relationship choice of the vast majority of adults. However, cohabitation is typically a short-lived and fragile state on its own terms, and those couples who cohabit prior to marriage are at a greatly increased risk of divorce.

How long does it last?

A fresh analysis of national data by a leading Christian social reform charity, the Jubilee Centre, shows that cohabitations are rarely a long-term lifestyle choice and the vast majority last only a short time before being converted into marriage or else dissolving. The average unmarried couple now lives together for three years and almost a half stop cohabiting before two years. Less than a quarter of first cohabitations last five years and just one in 19 of all cohabiting couples (5.3%) has been together for ten years or more.

Generally speaking, the data suggests that second and subsequent cohabitations tend to last slightly longer than first ones — somewhat surprising given the contrast with marriage, since second marriages are more prone to divorce than first ones. Those who have previously been married also tend to engage in longer cohabitations than the never-married, and their cohabitations are more likely to end in marriage.

The effect of children

Disturbingly, cohabitation is a much less stable form of relationship today than it was even just 15 years ago.

This is particularly pronounced for couples with children. The proportion of couples still cohabiting by the time their first child is 16 has dropped more than five-fold since the early 1990s. In contrast, marriage has become a more stable family background for children. So, married couples are now more than ten times as likely to stay together until their child is 16 — that is 75% do so, compared with just 7% of cohabiting ones.

Moreover, rather than add to the stability of a cohabiting relationship, having children appears to make a couple more likely to separate. Cohabiting couples who have a child while together are almost 25% more likely to separate than cohabiting couples who do not have a child together.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, a single mother who later enters a cohabitation with a man who is not the child’s father is actually more likely to end up marrying him. Seven out of ten such cohabitations end in marriage, compared to six out of ten of all cohabitations. The reason is presumably that such an arrangement presupposes a degree of responsibility and commitment on the part of the man in the first place, and is not entered into as lightly as a relationship without children.

The anniversary effect

Interestingly, 40% of all cohabitation break-up occurs within the first year and a quarter of this — 105 of all separations — happens in the month of the first anniversary.

Six months and 24 months are also major decision points — 5% of all separations occur at both these points. Other yearly intervals after the first are also occasions of increased separation rates, with almost 3% at 36 months.

Almost 5% of marriages also occur at the first anniversary of cohabitation. So, to an extent, marriage dates also coincide with anniversaries. Couples are choosing in advance to mark the occasion this way, rather than it being a catalyst for reconsidering their relationship. Many couples appear to consider cohabitation as a route into marriage. However, it also forms a route into divorce and separation.

‘Trial marriage’?

Secular wisdom promotes the idea that cohabitation might be good because it allows couples to get to know each other in a marriage-like relationship, and therefore to decide whether or not they are suited to marriage. However, our analysis of what actually happens in practice shows categorically that cohabitation does not serve as a ‘trial marriage’, but instead increases the probability of divorce.

Never-married couples who cohabit before getting married are 60% more likely to divorce than those who have not first lived together. Even taking into account time already lived together, cohabitees who go on to marry are 60% more likely to have split up within ten years. For people who have previously cohabited with a different partner, divorce is slightly less likely, but separation is correspondingly more likely.

Not only this, but those who do divorce tend to do so very quickly. The mean length of first marriages (with no previous cohabitation) that end in divorce is 13 years. The median is 11.5 years. In the case of those marriages that are preceded by a period of cohabitation and end in divorce, divorce tends to happen four years earlier. The mean length of such marriages is just over nine years, and the median 7.5 years.

The costs of cohabitation

These trends have huge personal, social, economic and political consequences for us all. To quote the long-time family scholar David Popenoe: ‘Few propositions have more empirical support in the social sciences than this one: compared to all other family forms, families headed by married, biological parents are best for children’ — and not just for children but also for the individuals involved.

The cost of family breakdown to society, whether parents have co-habited or married, is enormous. While the emotional cost (which inevitably has an impact on mental health and economic productivity) is difficult to quantify, it is possible to estimate the financial cost of family failure. Analysed in terms of tax and benefits, housing, health and social care, civil and criminal justice, and education, the annual cost of family breakdown totals £41.7 billion. This is equivalent to £1,350 per taxpayer per year.

Given the projected rise in cohabiting couples in England and Wales from 2.25 million to 3.7 million in the next 20 years, and the clear link between cohabitation and family breakdown, it is fair to expect these costs to rise significantly in coming years.

The rewards of marriage

On the other hand, all the evidence shows that, on average, married people earn more, have greater wealth, live longer, are happier and healthier, and even enjoy greater sexual satisfaction.

Yes, we could all point to evidence of what happens when things go wrong. Yet the evidence keeps stacking up. For instance, the latest studies, looking at the impact of nearly four decades of social change, confirm that ‘married adults have made greater economic gains over the past four decades than unmarried adults’. And the most comprehensive review of the impact of marriage to date, a study looking at 67,000 people over eight years, found that ‘the death rate for people who were unmarried was significantly higher than it was for those who were married and living with their spouses’, and, ‘Among the not married categories, having never been married was the strongest predictor of premature mortality’.

How to respond?

As with all areas of public policy, all this presents a challenge for each of us and our churches, not just for our elected local and national representatives in government. Could we get involved in — or, if they don’t already exist in our area, start — a relationship and parenting education programme or marriage education workshop in our community? How can we encourage young people to see ‘dating’ within the context of courtship, where courtship is defined as ‘finding and winning the right person for marriage’? And, as parents, in what ways might we be more intentional about talking to our children about marriage in general and God-centred marriage in particular?

If we do not help young people understand the benefits of taking the long view on relationships, then they will be easily persuaded by the ‘anything goes’ consumerist, individualistic mentality of the world around them. The Jubilee Centre has produced a range of resources to help equip Christians in this crucial area, placing love of God and neighbour at the heart of our ideas about love and intimate relationships.

Inadequacy of secular view

In the book Just Sex: Is it ever just sex? Guy Brandon demonstrates the inconsistency and inadequacy of the prevailing secular worldview on sex and relationships and offers a better, more just way, which brings with it the promise of God’s shalom.

Similarly, in Sex and the iWorld, politics professor and pastor Dale Kuehne exposes the weaknesses of what he calls the iWorld, in which the interests of the individual take priority over all other concerns and also argues that the church is wrong when it harks back to a former and inaccessible tWorld, in which traditional morality reigned; instead, prioritising love of God and neighbour, he presents the case for a more biblical rWorld, in which a larger web of healthy and nourishing social relationships provides the most personally fulfilling context for sexuality within marriage and for relational well-being, whether single or married.

To explore all these issues in greater depth, visit the Jubilee Centre’s blog and resources at http://www.jubilee-centre.com

The Jubilee Centre is a Christian charity that seeks to demonstrate the continued relevance of biblical principles to current trends and social issues. Its research, ‘Cohabitation in the 21st Century’, was based on the life histories of almost 30,000 adults, collected by the British Household Panel Survey.

New insights into current trends