The Effects of Cohabitation on Future Marriage Success

Over the course of the last half-century, living together before marriage has gone from rare and heavily stigmatized to normal and commonplace. At the same time, divorce rates have more than doubled, going from 20-25% of all marriages ending in divorce in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, to almost 50% today. Many couples, particularly young couples, believe that by cohabiting before marriage, they will be better able to choose a compatible marriage partner, and go into the marriage with a more accurate view of how they and their partner will solve conflict, divide responsibility, and how compatible they are both emotionally and sexually. However, most studies have found that couples that cohabit before marriage are more likely to get a divorce within the first ten years of marriage. Researchers are divided as to whether cohabitation itself is to blame for the increase in divorce rates, or whether other factors, such as socio-economic status, childhood family life, or level of education that are statistical factors for divorce are the same factors that lead to a predilection for premarital cohabitation. Using studies from the last ten years, this paper will argue that as cohabitation becomes societally normalized the likelihood of divorce will correlatively decrease, and that cohabitation on its own does not contribute to an unsuccessful or unstable future marriage. For the purposes of this paper, there will be two limitations on the studies and data collections used. The paper will focus only on studies on heterosexual couples, as legal same-sex marriage is too new for any meaningful data sets to have been accumulated. Additionally, the study will only look at couples that cohabit with the eventual goal of getting married, as opposed to couples that consider legal marriage to be unnecessary or undesirable in their union.
Most studies presented thus far have shown a strong positive correlation between cohabitation and eventual dissolution of marriage. One study, published by

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