Living together before marriage? Not anything new
Annie Reber and Dillin Randolph dated for a few months and then decided to move in together. More and more younger couples are cohabiting before marriage than ever before. Taken by: Steffanee Wang/Medill
For Annie Reber and Dillin Randolph, their studio bedroom is all they need until they can find a place and get married.
Tucked in the second floor of an old apartment building, the small space fits a queen bed, a couch, a TV, a kitchen, and a big fluffy cat. It’s not much, but it’s close enough for Reber to be a comfortable walking distance from her school and for Randolph to go to his job at Target.
“We’ve been living together since July of last year,” Randolph said, “Technically.”
“We technically lived together before, too.” Reber said. “We practically lived at each other’s houses from May on.”
After being together for a few months and already spending a lot of time together, Randolph moving in to Reber’s new apartment was the next obvious step.
http://youtu.be/wqcga6UVcEI
Their story is not unique. In fact, more and more couples are choosing to move in before getting married. Some don’t even get married at all.
In 2010, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention released a study stating that 48% of heterosexual woman from ages 14-44 were not married to their spouse when they lived with them for the first time. This is an increase from 43% in 2002, and 34% in 1995. It was also reported that fewer woman are getting married from 2006-2010, than in 2002 and 1995 (23%, 30%, 39% respectively).
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And according to, John Curtis, ph.D, the author of the book Happily Unmarried, the increase in cohabitation may have to do something with the 50 percent divorce rate in America.
“Younger people are cohabiting because of fear for a failed marriage,” Curtis said. “You know, they say, ‘I don’t want to get married without getting to know the person.’”
Randolph is one of those people. His parents got divorced when he was eight years old, and later, witnessed both of his aunts get divorced. Though he isn’t afraid of getting married, he said he believes “testing a person out is helpful to know if someone is good for marriage.”
“For them, marriage is till death do us apart,” Curtis said. “Whereas cohabitation is an experiment.”
And for Reber and Randolph, this is why they’re going to wait just a little while longer before they get married—and why they’d encourage other couples to wait, too.
“[Cohabiting] is not that much different from marriage,” Reber said. “If you’re living with someone, and you’re comfortable with it, that’s basically what marriage is.”
Besides the marital aspects of cohabitating, it’s just more convenient. Reber states that being able to be with each other after a long day of school and work is a big benefit to cohabitating.
However, the most common response to those who decide to live together married is that cohabitation can actually lead to divorce. A study done in July 2009 conducted a study where they interviewed couples who had been married 10 years or less. They found out that 19 percent of the couples who cohabitated before marriage had thought about divorce, 12 percent of couples who began to cohabitate after the engagement, and 10 percent for couples who didn’t cohabitate until after marriage.
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Despite these numbers, Reber and Randolph still support the idea of living together before marriage. To them, these divorces aren’t because of cohabitation; they’re because the couple gets tired of trying.
“People change,” Reber said. “Some people, like my grandparents, don’t want to compromise anymore. And so things fail.”
Cohabiting before marriage is not something that is strictly being observed in America. In fact, according to Curtis, cohabitation is somewhat the standard in Scandinavia and other European countries.
“If a child is born out of marriage, it has a greater chance to grow up in a stable home with two parents,” Curtis said. “Couples who aren’t married are more stable than American couples that are married.”
Perhaps the old “get married before living together” rule doesn’t apply anymore. At some point in the future, Curtis expects the rate of cohabitation will level off, and America will become more like Western Europe.
For now, Reber and Randolph are perfectly content in their tiny, studio apartment. At least, until Randolph can afford the ring. But they're not rushing anything.
