Sixties baby boomer Mary Kenny writes in the London Telegraph that cohabitation is probably more common than marriage among British young people.  She, like many of her generation, thinks cohabitation more rational and less repressive than getting married straight away.

So, she is taken aback by research showing that cohabiting relationships are far less stable than marriage.

But it emerges now that, far from being a natural prelude to marriage or permanent commitment, cohabitation can actually be an inoculation against it. Research by New York's Cornell University, published in the journal Demography, now reveals that cohabitation is unstable: half of all cohabitees' relationships last less than a year and 90 per cent end within five years, mostly because couples broke up.

This has prompted the Cornell boffins to describe cohabitation as an ''intense form of dating'' and their findings mirror the experience in Britain, where the average length of cohabitation is just two years, and more than half of all cohabitees split up within five years of the birth of a child.
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If cohabitation is seen as a try-out relationship lacking real commitment and frequently associated with failure, that elevates marriage, by definition, to the position of the gold standard. Cohabitation is the imitation: marriage is the real thing.

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