The Cohabitation Deal

If you really want to understand what the marriage bargain is today, look first at what it is not: Compare the marriage bargain with the cohabitation deal. Americans sometimes talk as if marriage were a private, personal relationship. But when two people live together for their own strictly private reasons and carve out their own strictly private bargain about the relationship, without any legal or social pressures, we call that relationship cohabitation.

In America cohabitation is now more popular than ever. More men, and women are moving in together, sharing an apartment and a bed, without getting married first. The latest Census Bureau figures show 4 million couples living together outside of marriage (not counting gay couples), eight times as many as in 1970. In 1970 there was one cohabiting couple for every one hundred married-couple households. Now, there are eight couples living together for every one hundred married couples.

Not only are more couples living together, they are doing so more openly. Thirty years ago men and women who lived together generally', presented themselves as married; often the woman would use her partner's surname and the title Mrs. In many states their relationship became a legal, common-law marriage after a certain number of years had passed.

But as the moral prohibition against premarital sex weakened and more unmarried men and women began to conduct active sex lives openly, the stigma of living together also weakened, although it has not disappeared.

In recent surveys American adults express neutrality to very mild disapproval of the idea of an unmarried couple living together.  Apparently, this opprobrium is too mild to act as much of a deterrent for most. About half of Americans from age thirty-five to thirty-nine have cohabited

The Cohabitation Deal

While disapproval of cohabitation is muted, what some social scientists predicted--a virtual blurring of the social boundaries between marriage and cohabitation-has not taken place. Both the general public and cohabitors themselves typically make a sharp distinction between marriage and living together. Cohabitation is not "just like marriage" but rather an emerging social lifestyle with a different set of social meanings, which generally serves different purposes. Contemporary cohabitations do not take on the protective coloration of marriage but flaunt their differences.

Of course, for some people, cohabitation is just a brief stop on the road to marriage rather than an alternative to it. Many cohabitors are engaged. And there is increasing evidence that cohabitors with definite plans to marry act and behave in ways that are similar to married couples. Cohabitors without plans to marry look very different from married couples-in their health habits, in the way they spend money, in their attitudes toward divorce and marriage, leisure and money, and in their fertility patterns.

Why do some people cohabit rather than marry? What is the difference between the marriage contract and the cohabitation deal? The prime difference between marriage and cohabitation in contemporary American culture has to do with time horizons and commitment. What makes marriage unique among emotional and financial relationships is the vow of permanence. With marriage, partners publicly promise each other that neither one will be alone any longer: Whatever else happens in life, someone will care about and take care of you. Even spouses who choose divorce hang on, with surprising persistence, to the ideal of marital permanence, preferring to see their own marriages as "a lie" rather than to reimagine marriage as a less-than-permanent union.  Eighty-one percent of divorced and separated Americans still believe marriage should be for life.

Cohabitation, by contrast, is seen by partners and society as a temporary arrangement. The majority of cohabitors either break up or marry within two years.

Single Parenthood with a Mate

We often think of cohabitors as young couples who aren't quite ready to marry. Over a quarter of unmarried mothers are cohabiting at the time of their children's birth, and many other cohabiting families have children from other unions.  Two-thirds of children entering stepfamilies do so in the setting of cohabitation rather than marriage, although many couples in these arrangements marry at some point. Half of currently married stepfamilies with children began with cohabitation.

The cohabiting partner is in an awkward position in these situations; he is not the children's father or stepfather, has no legal authority over them and no legal responsibility for them. And because the future of a cohabiting relationship is uncertain, the person living with a partner's children is taking a big risk by becoming emotionally attached to those kids. Perhaps as a result of this uncertainty, children living with cohabiting couples show poorer emotional development than children from married, two-parent families do.

For many cohabitors, the idea of relatively easy exit with no well defined responsibilities constitutes cohabitation's biggest attraction. Like other Americans, these cohabitors view marriage as a bigger commitment than living together, and they do not feel ready at this time, or with this partner, to take on the larger responsibilities to another person that marriage represents. Cohabitors, in other words, have a shorter time horizon than spouses do. Even when cohabitors have been together for long periods of time, they do not feel obligated to remain with this partner forever.

Blair, a social worker, who lives with Lauren, a speech pathologist, in a rambling suburban home with Lauren's two kids from a previous marriage, is typical of cohabitors in this regard. He explicitly contrasts the obligations of marriage with the lesser commitment he has made to Lauren. "I was dissatisfied being married 'cause I didn't like that contract. The overriding feeling of commitment was something I really didn't want." Even after years, Lauren agrees with Blair. "I still don't think of it [living together] as permanent," she says."

Fear of Fidelity

This lesser commitment to one's partner extends through all aspects of life, including sexual fidelity. Cohabitors are less likely than spouses to view their sexual union as permanently exclusive. As we shall see in chapter 6, cohabitors are less faithful to their partners than are married couples, and even when sexually faithful, they are less committed to the idea of sexual fidelity. Even if they are currently monogamous, many cohabitors say they are unwilling to say their partner will be the only person they ever sleep with for the rest of their lives.

Stewart, for example, has no plans to have sex with any woman but his live-in partner: "I don't think it is a good idea if I were to get sexually involved with another woman." And yet he has told his live-in lover, "I'm not going to tell you that I'm not going to be sexually involved with anyone [else] because of our relationship.... I want to make that decision because of how I feel-not because of how you feel. . . .""

While married couples typically define their relationship, in theory, as sexually exclusive, even if one of them cheats, cohabitors (especially those who aren't engaged) more often define their relationship, in principle, as sexually open, even if neither one has plans to have sex with anyone else.

A Bank Balance of One's Own

Cohabitors are frankly less willing to support or be financially responsible for their partners. Research into the varying reasons for divorce or breakups make this difference between married and cohabiting partners crystal clear: Whereas for married couples, income inequalities between spouses discourage divorce, for cohabitors, income inequalities between partners destabilize the relationship. Cohabitors, far more than spouses, are committed to economic independence from their partners. Such self sufficient relationships are harder to maintain when incomes are very unequal."

Because they do not see their future lives as necessarily intertwined and because they do not want to take responsibility for another person's welfare, cohabitors typically take steps to keep their time and money separate.

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