So Is Living Together Before Marriage Linked to Divorce or What?

Late last month, the Journal of Marriage and Family published a new study with a somewhat foreboding finding: Couples who lived together before marriage had a lower divorce rate in their first year of marriage, but had a higher divorce rate after five years. It supported earlier research linking premarital cohabitation to increased risk of divorce.

But just two weeks later, the Council on Contemporary Families—a nonprofit group based at the University of Texas at Austin—published a that came to the exact opposite conclusion about live-in girlfriends and boyfriends: Premarital cohabitation seemed to make couples likely to divorce. From the 1950s through 1970, “those who were willing to transgress strong social norms to cohabit...were also more likely to transgress similar social norms about divorce,” wrote the author Arielle Kuperberg, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. But as rate of divorce, once factors such as religiosity, education, and age at co-residence are accounted for.”