Research Findings That Show Cohabiting couples break up at MUCH higher rates than married people.

Marriage doesn't guarantee anything, however, it is, in general, the most stable form of relationship.

Children of married parents in general have better outcomes in many important areas than children of unmarried parents. If a couple stays together in a life long commitment without being married, then their children will probably have the same likelihood of good outcomes as children of married parents.  The problem with that is, couples merely living together have a much higher risk of breaking up than married parents.  The subsequently single, unwed mother faces, in many cases, poverty and her children face fatherlessness.  


Cohabiting couples break up at MUCH higher rates than married people.
Cohabiting parents break up at much higher rates than married parents.6
6  McManus, 2008, p. 41.
Do not cohabit if children are involved.  Children need and should have parents who are committed to staying together over the long term.  Cohabiting parents break up at a much higher rate than married parents and the effects of breakup can be devastating and often long lasting.   Moreover, children living in cohabiting unions are at higher risk of sexual abuse and physical violence, including lethal violence, than are children living with married parents.
One of the greatest problems for children living with a cohabiting couple is the high risk that the couple will break up.25
Fully three quarters of children born to cohabiting parents will see their parents split up before they reach age sixteen, whereas only about a third of children born to married parents face a similar fate
 Parental break up, as is now widely known, almost always entails a myriad of personal and social difficulties for children, some of which can be long lasting.  For the children of a cohabiting couple these may come on top of a plethora of already existing problems.  One study found that children currently living with a mother and her unmarried partner had significantly more behavior problems and lower academic performance than children from intact families.27
25.  Zheng Wu, "The Stability of Cohabitation Relationships: The
Role of Children."Journal of Marriage and the Family 57:231-236.
27.  Elizabeth Thompson, T. L. Hanson and S. S. McLanahan.. "Family
Structure and Child Well-Being: Economic Resources versus Parental
Behaviors." Social Forces 73-1:221-242.
cohabiting couples break up at a rate five times higher than for married couples
Poponoe.
http://www.zenit.org/rssenglish-23056

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The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies reports that by the age of 30, 81 percent of White women and 77 percent of Hispanics and Asians will marry, but that only 52 percent of Black women will marry by that age.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_1_59/ai_110361377/
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Cohabitation
It is believed that married couples make an attempt to compromise and accommodate to each other’s life because the marriage is supposed to last for life.  It is believed that cohabiting couples do not do this because they don’t have a life long commitment.

Sociologist Linda Waite of the University of Chicago contends, “Cohabitating couples lack both specialization and commitment in their relationships.”  She also goes on to say these couples will make less money and since they are not legally married, have to pay separate taxes on their separate incomes.  Waite believes that cohabitating couples are not the same as married couples and that their behavior proves this.
http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Probweb/Presentations/cohabit.html
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The Negative Effects of Cohabitation
Linda J. Waite

Cohabitation is a tentative, non-legal coresidential union. It does not require or imply a lifetime commitment to stay together. Even if one partner expects the relationship to be permanent, the other partner often does not. Cohabiting unions break up at a much higher rate than marriages. Cohabitors have no responsibility for financial support of their partner and most do not pool financial resources. Cohabitors are more likely than married couples to both value separate leisure activities and to keep their social lives independent. Although most cohabitors expect their relationship to be sexually exclusive, in fact they are much less likely than husbands and wives to be monogamous.

Cohabiting men tend to be quite uncommitted to the relationship; cohabiting women with children tend to be quite uncertain about its future


http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/rcq/rcq_negativeeffects_waite.html
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What Young Adults Need to Know about Cohabitation before Marriage

A Comprehensive Review of Recent Research

 David Popenoe and  Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

Cohabiting couples report lower levels of happiness, lower levels of sexual exclusivity and sexual satisfaction, and poorer relationships with their parents.13  One reason is that, as several sociologists not surprisingly concluded after a careful analysis, in unmarried cohabitation "levels of certainty about the relationship are lower than in marriage."14

It is easy to understand, therefore, why cohabiting is inherently much less stable than marriage and why, especially in view of the fact that it is easier to terminate, the break-up rate of cohabitors is far higher than for married partners. Within two years about half of all cohabiting relationships end in either marriage or a parting of the ways, and after five years only about 10% of couples are still cohabiting (data from the late 1980s).15  In comparison, only about 45% of first marriages today are expected to break up over the course of a lifetime.16
13.  Nock; Brown and Booth; Linda J. Waite and Kara Joyner,
Men's and Women's General Happiness and Sexual Satisfaction in
Marriage, Cohabitation and Single Living. Unpublished manuscript.
Chicago: Population Research Center, Univ. of Chicago;  Renate Forste
and Koray Tanfer. "Sexual Exclusivity Among Dating, Cohabiting, and
Married Women." Journal of Marriage the Family 58:33-47; Paul R. Amato
and Alan Booth.
. A Generation at Risk. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, Table 4-2, p. 258.

14.  Bumpass, Sweet, and Cherlin, p. 926

15.  Bumpass and Sweet

16.  Latest estimate based on current divorce rate.

WHY COHABITATION IS HARMFUL FOR CHILDREN
One of the greatest problems for children living with a cohabiting couple is the high risk that the couple will break up.25  Fully three quarters of children born to cohabiting parents will see their parents split up before they reach age sixteen, whereas only about a third of children born to married parents face a similar fate.  One reason is that marriage rates for cohabiting couples have been plummeting.  In the last decade, the proportion of cohabiting mothers who go on to eventually marry the child's father declined from 57% to 44%.26

 Parental break up, as is now widely known, almost always entails a myriad of personal and social difficulties for children, some of which can be long lasting.  For the children of a cohabiting couple these may come on top of a plethora of already existing problems.  One study found that children currently living with a mother and her unmarried partner had significantly more behavior problems and lower academic performance than children from intact families.27

It is important to note that the great majority of children in unmarried-couple households were born not in the present union but in a previous union of one of the adult partners, usually the mother.28  This means that they are living with an unmarried stepfather or mother's boyfriend, with whom the economic and social relationships are often tenuous.  For example, these children have no claim to child support should the couple separate.

Child abuse has become a major national problem and has increased dramatically in recent years, by more than 10% a year according to one estimate.29  In the opinion of most researchers, this increase is related strongly to changing family forms. Surprisingly, the available American data do not enable us to distinguish the abuse that takes place in married-couple households from that in cohabiting-couple households.  We do have abuse-prevalence studies that look at stepparent families (both married and unmarried) and mother's boyfriends (both cohabiting and dating).   Both show far higher levels of child abuse than is found in intact families.30
It was found that, compared to children living with married biological parents, children living with cohabiting but unmarried biological parents are 20 times more likely to be subject to child abuse, and those living with a mother and a cohabiting boyfriend who is not the father face an increased risk of 33 times. In contrast, the rate of abuse is 14 times higher if the child lives with a biological mother who lives alone. Indeed, the evidence suggests that the most unsafe of all family environments for children is that in which the mother is living with someone other than the child's biological father.31  This is the environment for the majority of children in cohabiting couple households.

http://www.smartmarriages.com/cohabit.html
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The risks of cohabitation

 Cohabiting couples who don't marry also break up at a rate that greatly exceeds the nation's divorce rate.

It's not hard to see why. Compared with married couples, cohabiting couples report lower levels of happiness, lower levels of sexual exclusivity and poorer relationships with parents. Annual rates of depression among cohabitors are more than three times higher than among married couples. By almost every measure, married couples are better off than cohabitors: On average, they live longer, have better physical and mental health, and are more productive in the labor force.

Cohabitation also poses special risks to women and children. (In 2000, 41 percent of unmarried-couple households included a child under 18.) Female cohabitors are victims of domestic violence far more often than married women, and children in unmarried households are at much greater risk for physical and sexual abuse than those in intact families. Indeed, the most unsafe of all family environments is that in which the mother is living with someone other than her children's biological father.

What explains these differences between married and cohabiting couples? Partly, it's ``selection effect'': As a group, people who choose to cohabit differ in certain ways from those who don't. On average, for example, cohabitors are less religious and have lower incomes. In addition, however, the act of cohabitation seems to change people's attitudes toward marriage in ways that make a stable marriage less likely. Cohabitation is governed by an ethic of low commitment. As a result, cohabiting couples are less likely than married couples to sacrifice for each other, or to develop vital skills of communication and conflict resolution.

For contemporary Americans, cohabitation's fundamental attraction is its embrace of a hallmark quality of our age: self-absorption. By definition, cohabitation is more about ``me'' than ``we.'' Each partner is free to leave the moment he or she no longer feels happy or fulfilled. A cohabiting couple do not promise to stand by one another ``for richer, for poorer'' or ``in sickness and in health.'' On the contrary, cohabitation's great attraction is that it preserves the ability to walk out on a partner when times get tough, without legal or social penalty.
http://www.americanexperiment.org/news/op-eds/2002-07-17.php
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Living Together Dangerously

Study Reveals Perils of Cohabitation

One major problem with cohabitation, the book explains, is that the two partners often start living together for very different motives. While many women look upon it as a stepping-stone to marriage, men often look at it for convenience, and not as a firm commitment.

Popenoe agreed with the McManus book concerning the disadvantages of cohabitation for children. Given that cohabiting couples break up at a higher rate compared to married couples, this brings with it more stress and disruption for children. Higher rates of child abuse and family violence also bring problems for kids.

This disadvantage for children, Popenoe commented, also has a lot to do with the major trend in family patterns in past years with the shift of child rearing from married parents to single parents, mostly mothers. In a number of countries the chances are now better than fifty-fifty that a child will spend some time living with just one parent before reaching adulthood.

Single parenthood stems both from unwed births and from parental breakup after birth. Cohabitation is a factor in spurring higher parenthood due to births to couples not married. It is also responsible due to the higher breakup rate for cohabiting couples who have children -- which is more than twice what it is for married couples with children.

Popenoe tied in the higher break-up rate to the lack of commitment in cohabiting couples, a point also mentioned in the McManus book. Cohabiting partners, he said, “tend to have a weaker sense of couple identity, less willingness to sacrifice for the other, and a lower desire to see the relationship go long term.”

He cited one study carried out in the United States that calculated cohabiting couples break up at a rate five times higher than for married couples.

http://www.zenit.org/rssenglish-23056
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Cohabitation Facts

Cohabiting parents break up at much higher rates than married parents.6
6  McManus, 2008, p. 41.
http://www.citizenlink.org/FOSI/marriage/cohabitation/A000007333.cfm
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www.prepare-enrich.com
Updated March 2007
Overview of Cohabitation Research
David H. Olson and Amy Olson-Sigg


What are some characteristics of couples that cohabit?
• On PREPARE & ENRICH, cohabiting couples have significantly lower scores on most
categories (Olson).
• Couples living together have the lowest level of premarital satisfaction when compared to

Cohabiting couples are less sexually committed or trustworthy (Waite & Gallagher).
Cohabiting males are less involved in housework and childrearing (Waite & Gallagher).
Cohabiting increases the risk of couple abuse and, if there are children, child abuse
(Thompson, Hanson & McLanahan).

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