Those who prefer co-habitation will tell you that living together can help you get used to a person and decide if there is any reason you should not move forward in your relationship. It's like testing the waters. This seems logical.
I could respond to that with this study I found over at ScienceBlog.com. It found that couples that lived together before marriage had poorer communication skills than those who did not. I'm not sure why, but it's always fun to quote studies.
Then there's this one, which found that there are higher divorce rates for couples who co-habitate before the wedding. This is getting pretty serious; couples who live together first run a higher risk picking up bad communication skills and getting divorced. Sounds dreary.
But, I really don't think we've gotten to the heart of the issue, yet. Are you in love with someone so much so that you want to get married and form a lifelong relationship with them? Do they feel the same about you? Then living together is not necessary. If you and your significant other are prepared to enter into such a serious commitment, then nothing you learn in cohabitation is going to change your mind. Do you think that such strong feelings could be swept away once you learn that the other person scrapes their toast, or watches dumb TV shows? Does true love yield to snoring and leaving the dishes for too long? Will you turn your back on your loved one when you realize that they like to watch movies with the subtitles on?
If they had lived together before getting married he would have known that she collected mud in large jars. This guy totally blew it.
So if you want to get married, there's no need to debate co-habitation. There are few (if any) new things you will learn about someone when moving in, and if you're in it for the long haul none of it will matter. By the time you're ready to make your relationship permanent you will already know the other person well enough to know if you can live with them.
8 comments:
Did you see this by my friend Nathan? http://www.leadersoftherevolution.com/articles/721/
Great post by the way.
Let's go over the methdology.
1. Suppose there is divine revelation obligating the idea of waiting until marriage. Will any amount of statistics overrule this? Suppose it has been true for a decade that cohabiting "works," i.e., makes it statistically more likely that the relationship doesn't fail. Can the "is" overrule the "ought?" No! Otherwise it wouldn't be a divinely originated obligation, and second, if newer statistics told people that they have now become unlikely to succeed, that takes away their original source of overruling the "ought."
2. Besides that, a statistical majority is little comfort! Where on the bell curve will a particular couple fall?! So even a 90% success rate for cohabiting still predicts that 10% will fall.
3. However, there's the problem of deriving an "ought" from an "is." Just because some studies correlate premaritally uncohabitating couples and successful lifelong relationships doesn't make it obligatory for couples to follow that. There's no mandate inside the natural world of facts that says "Thou shalt choose to follow what is likely." Its attraction is that it whispers "when that's what you want anyway!" I think you mention that, in your post, talking about merely having fun with studies.
4. So as not to pin hopes on studies, you ask good practical questions toward the end bro, but certainly there are very few, a tiny percentage, who get married that don't say they are making a serious commitment and have strong feelings at the time of marriage, certainly strong enough to handle snoring etc.
5. Perhaps then, you leave open the subject of, communication skills lacking. Their initial feelings are there, their initial commitment is there, but they lack skills. But why bring up skills as the determinative thing among all the ongoing factors in our marriages? By "communication skills" I presume you mean ongoing ones, not just the original ones. But if they are important (and they are!) how much more should ongoing commitment and ongoing feelings (or at least feelings-management) be a factor?
Just some thoughts on your thoughts. My own idea is that relationships are full of ongoing choices of right and wrong, and therefore the presence and enlistment of the whole gamut of what God provides us is necessary to use, in an ongoing way. I don't think there's any way to get around pinning our hopes on the ongoing help of the resources that revelation says are available to us. And even then! Does God promise unconditionally that Christian marriages that seek him won't fail? He promises that He won't fail us, but what does He guarantee about our fellow? Paul says, at the end of his life, that all have deserted him. Similarly, something like Romans 3:4.
Most promising me in this area is the couple that is mindful of the uncertainty of it, under His rules, even with God's help, and takes the risk, and works like crazy to manage and watch that risk....
"By the time you're ready to make your relationship permanent you will already know the other person well enough to know if you can live with them."
While that's true, it also seems like you're assuming that you should want to be looking towards a permanent commitment with someone before you consider living with them, which I don't think is necessarily true. There are plenty of reasons to live together without getting married, and relationships, like everything else, are unique to the individuals involved, and they alone should be deciding when it's time to live together. (religious issues aside, which don't affect everyone)
Justin. The title of this blog entry is, "Should Couples Live Together Before Getting Married? Good Question." This places the conversation in the realm of pre-marital relations. Your argument belongs in a broad discussion of co-habitation, which is not what I set up.
In the spirit of Proverbs 18:17, I'd like to point out something in my previous comment that needs correction. If the best way is to have God's help in the moral aspects of relationships and to work like crazy to manage the ongoing obstacles as they come up, how did other generations and cultures do it? Were they full of Christians that knew every ounce of the weighty things Christ gives us for moral battles, and fought their hardest and strongest for their marriages? If not, how did they succeed without that?
I think that we have to point out that relationships are far more vulnerable to fail in this present culture than in ours previously, or in others. The reason we need to fight now and here, use our resources daily, etc., is because of the pressure on relationships. For many centuries there were very few people with any access, much less instant access, to objects that appeal to the eyes and ears as things we would want that we don't have. The sheer quantity of options has put our present relationships under constant pressure.
Is that really an issue in the US? I think I don't know any couple who did not live together for some time before getting married.
Living together is not "hip" here (Germany), it seems to be the normal way of life. Meet someone, fall in love, move in together, then marry.
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