Saturday, October 26, 2013

Cohabitation: A Test-Run for Marriage

I have been wanting to do a blog post on this specific topic, but did not know how to start it. I guess I will begin by talking a little bit about my family. The side of my family that I mainly grew up around believe strongly in living with someone before you get married to them, otherwise called cohabitation. It is not only common in my family, but in much of the United States as well. The common belief is that living with someone before you get married makes a better marriage down the road. There are more problems with cohabitation than people really realize. One of these is the fact that when you decide to live with someone before you get married that getting pregnant is a very high possibility. When you are married and have an unplanned pregnancy, it is much easier to deal with because you have made a promise to be with one another through anything that may come your way rather than someone you are just living and having sex with. An unplanned pregnancy can cause a lot of problems and change your life dramatically. My mother and father were unmarried and lived together while going to college. They had a sexual relationship and ended up with an unplanned pregnancy (me). Their relationship ended soon after they found out they were pregnant and my mother went home to Southern California while my father joined the United States Army. I do not know if they would have stayed together if I had not come into the picture, but it changed both of their lives forever. It not only affected them, but me as well. I get to live my life without knowing what it is to have my mother and father married. It never really bothered me too much when I was growing up because I grew up in an area where that was very common. As I have gotten older, I have noticed that it affected me a great deal. I have heard some success stories when it comes to cohabitation, but for the most part I have seen similar things happen to families like my parents and I. Another problem with cohabitation is that you get to experience marriage with someone without actually being married. Where this sounds like a positive thing, it isn't. It is like sharing your life with someone without having any commitment at all. In some cases cohabitation has worked, but when you look at the general view of how it affects families as a whole, the cons outweigh the pros. 

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing some personal insights. How do you think your personal experience will influence your future relationships and marriage? Why do you believe cohabitation is still so common when so much research has proven it ineffective? Why do you think cohabitation frequently leads to divorce? You mentioned that when people cohabit there is a lack of commitment which obviously can lead to problems. Why is commitment through marriage so important? What other types of emotional connections are seen more frequently in marriage as opposed to cohabitation?

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    1. Well, from seeing what cohabitation has done to my family and to me personally, I will never do it. I definitely want to be married before I live with someone and there is no doubt in my head that it is the right decision. Where there is a lot of research that proves cohabitation ineffective, family influence as well as biological urges to be with someone supersedes that 99.9% of the time. There are many factors that connect cohabitation and divorce, but the one I have seen most common is the fact that they have a child or children before making the commitment to get married. Making a commitment like marriage, to be together through everything, makes having a child much less stressful. From what I have seen in my family as well as other families, those who have children before getting married have a harder time working together to raise that child. Now, of course this isn't always the case, but it is extremely common. Commitment through marriage isn't just important when raising kids, but in every part of life. When you decide to share your life with someone, would you rather know that you have that commitment from them or live without knowing if they are in it for the long run? For most people, I think that question answers itself. As for emotional connections, I think that it is clear that married couples definitely share stronger emotional connections than those who cohabitate simply because they have made that commitment to be together for their whole lives (and beyond).

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