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Miscellaneous See other Miscellaneous Articles Title: Age of cohabitation determines marriage future A new study suggests the age when couples start cohabiting – whether married or unmarried – correlates with divorce rates, adding new nuance to studies about cohabitation and marriage.. ....For years, social scientists have tried to explain why living together before marriage seemed to increase the likelihood of a couple divorcing. Now, new research released by the nonpartisan Council on Contemporary Families gives an answer: It doesn’t. And it probably never has. This is despite two decades of warnings from academics and social commentators who pointed to studies that claimed a correlation between “shacking up” and splitting up – warnings that increased as the number of couples living together before marriage skyrocketed. RECOMMENDED: What is your social class? Take our quiz to find out! As it turns out, those studies that linked premarital cohabitation and divorce were measuring the wrong variable, says Arielle Kuperburg, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, who produced much of the research released Monday. The biggest predictor of divorce, she says, is actually the age at which a couple begins living together, whether before the wedding vows or after. “Up until now, we’ve had this mysterious finding that cohabitation causes divorce,” she says. “Nobody’s been able to explain it. And now we have – it was that people were measuring it the wrong way.” Couples who begin living together without being married tend to be younger than those who move in after the wedding ceremony – that’s why cohabitation seemed to predict divorce, Professor Kuperburg explains. But once researchers control for that age variable, it turns out that premarital cohabitation by itself has little impact on a relationship’s longevity. Those who began living together, unmarried or married, before the age of 23 were the most likely to later split. “Part of it is maturity, part of it is picking the right partner, part of it is that you’re really not set up in the world yet,” she says. “And age has to do with economics.” Indeed, other research released by the nonpartisan academic group Monday suggests that the longer couples wait to start living together, the better their chances for long-term relationship success. This makes sense to historian Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. “Marriages require much more maturity than they once did,” she says. In the 1950s, husband and wives stepped into well-defined gender rolls. “Nowadays, people come to marriage with independent aspirations and much greater ideas of equality. Maturity is so important, and negotiating skills are so much more important.” Over the past 50 years, the number of couples who live together before marriage has increased some 900 percent. There has also been some softening of the perceived link between these living arrangements and divorce: In 2012, the Centers for Disease Control released a report saying that couples who moved in together while engaged had no greater risk for divorce than those who moved in after they were married; other researchers said the difference between premarital cohabitating couples and married couples seemed to be lowering, at least for those who moved in together in the 1990s. But the hand-wringing continued. “People, even well read people, end up having a lot of misinformation about what makes divorce more or less likely,” says Virginia Rutter, professor of sociology at Framingham State University in Massachusetts. “The big message [of the new reports] for me is thank goodness there is now really good, clear, unambiguous research that can help us get rid of the ‘cohabitation is the issue’ approach. It goes from the easy answer – that life’s problems are about character – to the more challenging answer, that life’s problems are about context – [about] what are the resources that you are empowered to pull together to create a good life.” Indeed, Sharon Sassler, a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., argues in a different academic paper made public Monday that the length of time a couple has been romantically involved before moving in together is also crucial to whether they end up divorcing. That, she says, has connections to a host of educational and financial factors. Those with higher education levels tend to take longer to move in with their partners, she found. Half of college-educated women moved in with their partners after at least a year; one-third were romantically involved for two years before joining house. Data from the most recent National Survey of Family Growth show that more than half of women with only a high school degree in a cohabitating relationship moved in with their partner in less than six months. Professor Sassler found in her research that many couples with lower incomes and less education decided to move in together because of financial pressures. She argues that it is the type of premarital cohabitation that predicts divorce, not necessarily cohabitation in itself. RECOMMENDED: What is your social class? Take our quiz to find out! This jibes with another one of Kuperburg’s findings: that there are two general types of cohabitation, one that the couples view as the first step toward marriage, engagement ring or not, and one that is done without the same commitment, or out of perceived convenience. “People who think they are going to get married act the same as people who are married,” she says. “People who are not sure, they act very differently. They have different work habits, health habits. But living together to ‘test drive’ the marriage? According to my research, that shouldn’t affect marriage at all. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Tatarewicz (#0)
If two people really cared for each other, the honorable thing to do is get married. No games and no bull. This notion of living together to 'test drive' the marriage are conwords used to just use the other person without taking legal responsibilities for your personal property and any children brought into this. You are either married or you're not.
Could we have a link to this study? I need to learn what social class I'm in. Thanks “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken
The people I've known who lived together mostly didn't get married to their partner, just split up after a while.
"Have Brain, Will Travel
Had I known near 36 years back, what I know now, I'd never have involved the state in our marriage.
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken
For cohab story: http://news.yahoo.com/best-predi...study-says-131122832.html To determine if you're in peasant or upper class: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Soc...to-find-out/dream-vehicle Interesting tidbit in quiz results analysis: Hindus are the wealthiest and most educated religious group in the country, with 65 percent of adults coming from households with incomes over $75,000, and 74 percent holding college degrees. Jehovah's Witnesses have the least wealth and education, with 18 percent earning more than $75,000 and just 9 percent graduating from college. And on average, atheists and agnostics are somewhat wealthier and more educated than the general US public, according to The Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project. But don't believe everything in quiz results analysis; I'm not even American. BOURGEOIS VOUS Your habits and perspectives most resemble those of upper-middle-class Americans. Though members of this group are not the most accurate judges of others' emotions, they do have a high faith in people's basic decency, and a commitment to raising healthy, curious, and imaginative children. Your people eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, eschew cigarettes, and live in homes full of books. You have vast and eclectic tastes in music, which likely exclude country, gospel, rap, and heavy metal. In fact, you identify so strongly with your own individual tastes, that you may resent it a bit when friends impinge upon your discoveries.
Thanks - I bailed after # 5.
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken
For what reason? The quiz is a rather clever adaptation of a bunch of psychological research and quite instructive. I'm on dialup so it took me 2 hours, possibly because some "updates" were being downloaded.
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