Parent Trap? No, Cohabitation Trap!

And here I thought people were wising up to the fact that living together in sin before marriage wasn't leading to human fulfillment and bliss, and then to come across Mr. Johnston'e piece:

The Co-Habitation Trap

GEORGE SIM JOHNSTON

There's no such thing as a trial marriage.

Recently, a college classmate told me that her 25-year-old son has a girlfriend about whom he can't make up his mind. The couple have been going together for two years. He is serious about the girl, thinks she'd make a good wife, but tells his mother that he's not sure about taking the plunge. Should he propose? Should he take more time to think about it? Maybe date other girls to gain perspective? The son is at a loss.

My friend is generally a sensible person, and she gave her son what she thinks is good advice: why not move in with her and see how it goes? In other words, do a trial marriage. If the sharing of bed and board goes smoothly, then tie the knot. If it doesn't, you can go your separate ways and will have been spared what nobody wants: a broken marriage.

My friend unfortunately was steering her son into what might be called the "co-habitation trap." It so happens — contrary to widespread belief — that the divorce rate among couples who live together before marriage is notably higher than the normal divorce rate — up to 40 percent higher, depending on which study you look at.

There are variations within this disquieting statistic. Couples who get engaged before moving in together do better than couples who don't. If it's the woman's first and only live-in situation, the divorce rate is lower. Brief cohabitators are more likely to stay married than longer-term ones. Whatever the nuances, however, all these categories produce higher divorce rates than that for couples who don't live together before marriage.

Why is this? It seems counter-intuitive. A young woman might say to her friends, "I wouldn't dream of marrying a man until first living with him for a couple of years." And her friends would nod sagely. It makes a certain kind of sense: take a test drive before committing to a model.

But this scenario doesn't always work in real life. Years ago, a friend of mine moved in with his girlfriend. They shared a loft in SoHo and seemed to have a marvelous time being a young Manhattan couple. After two years, they married. A year later, the marriage cracked up bitterly. I said to him one day, "What happened? The two of you seemed great together." "I don't know," he replied. "It's as though all of a sudden all the wrong buttons were pushed."

The point is that there's no such thing as a trial marriage. As Barbara Dafoe Whitehead puts it, "Living together is not to marriage as spring training is to the baseball season."

Here are some problems with cohabitation:

When a couple move in together, they seldom ask the sort of questions one ought to ask about a partner with whom one is going to spend the rest of one's life. Do I really share this person's values? Do I want my children to have this person's values? The worst scenario is sliding into cohabitation and then sliding into marriage. Decide, don't slide, as the saying goes.
It has been well observed that in a good marriage, whenever a wife or husband uses the pronoun "I" he or she also means "we." But when a cohabiting person uses the pronoun "I", he or she often means "I." The couple have separate names, separate bank accounts; there's an implicit agreement that either can back out of the relationship. In brief, they are rehearsing a low-intensity commitment. But marriage involves a high-intensity commitment.

Besides, no happily married couple have ever looked at one another, slapped their foreheads, and exclaimed, "If only we had started having sex six months earlier!"

Sex can get in the way of the prudential judgments one should make about the person one is going to marry. Sex and lucid judgment don't always go together, to say the least. Sex releases hormones like oxytocin, which, among other things, act like a bonding agent, even when the couple in reality may not be suited to one another. It is much harder to break up a bad relationship when sex is going on. Abstaining couples, on the other hand, tend to look at one another with greater clarity. The emotional growth of their relationship is not short-circuited by an act that presumes more commitment than is the case.
Men and women go into cohabitation with very different assumptions and expectations. A woman will tend to regard living together as a dress rehearsal for marriage, while her partner has much looser ideas about the arrangement. She will typically take less time than he does deciding in favor of marriage. In fact, he's happy to postpone the decision for as long as possible. This can lead to scenes. She doesn't even have to utter the word "marriage" to make him defensive. All she has to say is something like, "I don't see where this relationship is going," to set him off. "You're putting pressure on me!" "Things are fine the way they are!" "I don't want to be pushed into anything!" And so forth.

"We suspect, rightly," James Q. Wilson writes in The Marriage Problem, "that marriage differs from cohabitation. Cohabitation means that two people agree to live together, sharing rooms, meals, and sex. Marriage means that two people promise to live together until they die, sharing rooms, meals, sex, and a permanent obligation to care for one's spouse. The promise is at the heart of the matter."

It's not easy to abstain from sex prior to marriage. Especially when a couple are already engaged. But to reserve sex for marriage is to affirm its meaning and ultimately strengthen the bond of marriage. Sex is the consummation of a solemn promise; it doesn't work so well without it.

Besides, no happily married couple have ever looked at one another, slapped their foreheads, and exclaimed, "If only we had started having sex six months earlier!" Instead, they can share a fond memory of waiting for the starting gun to go off.

Acknowledgement

George Sim Johnston. "The Co-Habitation Trap." The Catholic Thing (August 1, 2015).

Reprinted by permission of The Catholic Thing.

The Author

George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York City. He graduated from Harvard with a B. A. in English literature and was an investment banker with Salomon Brothers in the seventies and early eighties. Since then he has been a free-lance writer, publishing with The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, Commentary, Harvard Business Review, National Catholic Register, World Catholic Report, and other publications. He is a three-time winner of the Journalism Award from the Catholic Press Association. He teaches marriage preparation and CCD for the Archdiocese of New York and is the author of Did Darwin Get it Right?: Catholics and the Theory of Evolution.

Comments

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D: This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

The 21st Century Must Come Into the Church

Continued from September 14.... T hrough the Church’s teachings, God has also revealed his truth on how humanity can live happily. What is so little understood by Catholics and Christians is that doctrinal revelations that come through the Church come out of God’s very Self. They are not tied to culturally constructed norms! Read Vatican II’s Dei Verbum : “by divine revelation God wished to manifest and communicate both himself and the eternal decrees of his will concerning the salvation of humankind.” Our Lord’s Church derives its basic vision not from mere human speculation, which would be tentative and uncertain, but from God’s own testimony—from a historically given divine revelation. Thus Catholics believe that just as God himself is immutable, so, too, are His teachings as revealed through the Church because they come from him. As I discuss in my book, although the Church does not change its central teachings, we do see the theological principle of “devel...

A Child's Right

O ver the years since the accession of Jose Bergoglio to the Chair of Peter, in perusing the Huffington Post blog, the National Catholic Reporter website and other “progressive” social media, one gets the impression that these folks believe Francis (“Who Am I to Judge?”) will revolutionize Catholic teaching on marriage. On these pages I have frequently noted many of Francis’ statements affirming traditional-Biblical-natural marriage, as well as his extremely strong remarks back in Argentina, where he declared same-sex “marriage” a diabolical effort of “the Father of Lies” to “destroy God’s plan … and deceive the children of God.” He said then—only four years ago—that gay “marriage” discriminates against children “in advance,” depriving them of “their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God.” At stake, said Cardinal Bergoglio, was “the total rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts” and the very survival of the human family, with Satan at work. I co...

Novus Motus Liturgicus

From The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God: In 1959, Pope John XXIII saw a true need for liturgical renewal within the Roman Rite in accordance with the metaphorical principle of organic development, the aim of the Liturgical Movement endorsed by Pope St. Pius X. In authentic organic development, the Church listens to what liturgical scholars deem necessary for the gradual improvement of liturgical tradition, and evaluate the need for such development, always with a careful eye on the preservation of the received liturgical tradition handed down from century to century. In this way, continuity of belief and liturgical practice is ensured. As Cardinal Ratzinger wrote at the time, the principle of organic development ensures that in the Mass, “only respect for the Liturgy’s fundamental unspontaneity and pre-existing identity can give us what we hope for: the feast in which the great reality comes to us that we ourselves do not manufacture , but receive as a gift. Organic de...

Is Homosexuality a Sin?

I am very tired of hearing that Our Lord's Church regards homosexuality as a sin. Let's be clear--as a result Original Sin and our fallen, wounded nature, we are afflicted by all kinds of disorders that are not of our own making—physical, mental, emotional, sexual, you name it. In Catholic teaching, what governs whether something is naturally disordered is whether or not it is working according to its proper end, whether it is properly ordered to its natural purpose. If it is not, we call it “disordered”. Inclinations with respect to any of our faculties which make us want to use those faculties in a way inconsistent with their proper end are not sinful; they simply reflect our own disorder, our lack of perfect integrity. Such predispositions often become major temptations, and if we continue to indulge an inclination to act in a manner inconsistent with the relevant proper ends, we sin. The Church does not hold a homosexual inclination (orientation) to be sinf...

Dancing with Mr. D: Bullying Catholic Schools: the Wave of the Near Future

The Archdiocese of Vancouver is celebrating educational diversity in new ways, all because a family and their lawyer believe in celebrating diversity — and if you object because of your Catholic faith, they will sue you until you are forced to comply. In a joint statement the Catholic Independent Schools of the Vancouver Archdiocese and the family of Tracey Wilson, an 11-year-old diagnosed with gender dysphoria who had attended a Catholic school, announced the CISVA approval of a new policy that accommodates gender expression and students with gender dysphoria. The Wilson family is applauding the CISVA for paving the way towards accepting gender expression and gender dysphoria in youth. It will be the first Catholic school district in Canada to have such a policy. The new policy was developed after Tracey, who was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, filed a human rights complaint because her school did not accommodate her request to be treated as a girl. The human rights compl...

Libido Redux: TransJennerism

The reader of these pages is aware that in this current time of post-Obergefell “same sex marriage,” we are also witnessing increased fascination with transgenderism and an emerging indifference to gender. Thus I found it interesting to observe Walt Heyer, who has undergone surgery to become and woman and then back to a man, has the most poignant article on this topic which includes the regrets of a physician who underwent gender reassignment surgery . Let’s not forget the amazingly candid list of regrets written by Renee Richards in her book No Way Renee . While not regretting her surgery outright, she makes it clear she did it because she thought she had no choice. Her choice destroyed her family, her capacity to love like she/he used to, her spirituality, and more.

Ode to Freddi: Be Careful When You Write Papa

Last fall, militant Italaian atheist Piergeorgio Oddifreddi wrote Dear Pope, I'm Writing to You. O difreddi later said he was particularly surprised that Benedict read his book from cover to cover and wanted to discuss it, as it had been billed as a “luciferian introduction to atheism.” He should not have been so surprised, had he known his man. Odifreddi's book was a critique of certain arguments and lines of thought found in Benedict’s theological writings, beginning with his 1967 volume Introduction to Christianity , and including his book Jesus of Nazareth , which he wrote as pope, both of which I have profited from enormously. “My opinion about your book is, as a whole, rather mixed,” B16 said. “I profited from some parts, which I read with enjoyment, but in other parts I was astonished at a certain aggressiveness and thoughtless argumentation.” He noted that, several times, Odifreddi refers to theology as science fiction, and he...

Read My First Chapter for Free!

St. Michael the Archangel Kindle allows one to share quotes from books on Facebook. Here is an entire chapter...

On Following Jesus

I began my book noting the ignorance of Catholics about what the Second Vatican Council really teaches, and concluded with one final such teaching: …a monumental struggle against the powers of darkness pervades the whole history of man. The battle was joined from the very origins of the world and will continue until the last day, as the Lord has attested. Caught in this conflict, man is obliged to wrestle constantly if he is to cling to what is good, nor can he achieve his own integrity without great efforts and the help of God's grace. Our Lord commands us to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age." The slothful Catholic risks a terrible consequence for failure here: “So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.” With so man...

Search This Blog