The Australian Family, March 2003, p. 20
Cohabitation Concerns
Linda Waite is professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. This interview is found in Marriage: Just a Piece of Paper? (Anderson, et. al., eds., Eerdmans, 2002).
Cohabitation very much depends what people want. It's not marriage for most people, and if people are expecting marriage-like benefits without getting married the evidence suggests they don't get the marriage benefits. If what they want is a roommate with sex, then cohabitation is fine. It's easy exit, and cohabiters, unless they are engaged and they have the hall rented and the dress bought, tend to lead separate lives. They tend to have separate social lives. They tend not to co-mingle finances. They don't have a joint checking account. They don't co-insure. They don't say, "Listen, if anything happens to you in twenty years, I'll take care of you, I'll be there" They very much don't do that.
So a lot of the things that people get with marriage, you don't get with cohabitation. What you get is freedom and independence. So it depends on what you want. If you thought you were getting security, commitment, dependability, fidelity, you're much less likely to get it with cohabitation.
I'm not talking about all cohabiters. The cohabiters who are getting married look on lots of dimensions like people who are already married. I'm talking about people who don't have any plans to marry. They tend to lead much more separate lives than married people do. Their social lives are more separate. Their financial lives are more separate. They're much more likely to have a second sexual partner even though they say they expect their partner to be faithful to them. When you ask cohabitaters if they expect their partner to be faithful to them, they report "yes" as often as married people. But they don't do that. So, yes, it's a different agenda.
Is that because of the trial nature of cohabitation? I think that's true, especially if they don't have plans to marry. Sometimes I think it's just convenience. It works for now and let's not worry about what's going to come. But there's some recent research suggesting that, especially for women with children, cohabitation leads to fairly high levels of depression, mostly because they're unsure about the future of the relationship.
So in that situation, cohabiters definitely don't get the emotional benefits of marriage, especially for women with children who come with some feeling like this person's going to be around for a while, that they're committed to you, that they're working for you and with you and you're working as a team. In cohabitation, you're not working as a team. You're just sort of together on the bus.
When cohabitation first came on the scene, we saw it as something that college students did. But in the last thirty years, there has been a fairly substantial change. Now cohabitation is more common for couples with relatively low levels of education and less common for couples where the partners are college educated.
When social scientists first started studying cohabitation, they thought, "Oh, well, it's a way to gather information. You should see if you're compatible, if this is a good idea, if you're a good match. The people who find out that they really don't like living with this person should split up" So the only people who should go to marriage would be those who found out this was really what they wanted. They liked it. They liked this person. This was going to work.
So they ought to be less likely to divorce than people who married not having this information, right? Those marriages ought to be more stable. In fact, every research project that's ever looked at the stability of marriages that were preceded by cohabitation has found that people who lived together before they get married are significantly more likely to divorce later. It's true in Canada. It's true in Sweden. It's true in the U.S. It's true wherever we've looked. So for some reason, living with somebody is just not a guarantee.
Regarding marriage, there certainly are marriages that are horrible, and nobody would suggest that people stay in those marriages. You can't. But, in fact, the chance that a man becomes an alcoholic or a career criminal if he has a tough adolescence goes down if he gets married. You can look at men's drinking patterns - say, follow young men during their twenties. Some of them get married at twenty-two; some of them get married at twenty-five. You can look at their drinking patterns and see the chances that they drink to excess declines as they find someone, become engaged, and get married. You see the same thing with criminal behavior - that if men who are serious delinquents as adolescents find someone to marry, and it works, then that often turns them around, which is pretty amazing.
So, on the one hand, if anybody in the marriage has really substantial personality problems or problems with violence or problems with addiction, it's not good for the individuals involved, and it certainly wouldn't be good to stay in that marriage. But that's relatively rare. I can give you examples on domestic violence, because I'm just looking at that now. About 5 percent of married men and married women say that arguments between them became physical in the last year and ended up with somebody pushing, hitting, or shoving. Seventeen percent of cohabiters with no plans to marry and 14 percent of cohabiters with plans to marry reported that happening. This is once we take into account age and race and gender and education. Big differences. So, the chances that there'll be violence in your relationship are lower for married people than they are for people who are cohabiting.
There is a strand that runs through all of this. The people who choose to cohabit are probably different people than the people who choose to marry directly. For example, people with strong religious values would be less likely to cohabit, more likely to marry directly, and probably more committed to the institution of marriage, however they feel about the particular person. Investments in your marriage, even if it's because you think that marriage is a sacrament, improve the quality of the marriage. So if you take two couples and one of them commits to marriage and the other one says, "I'm with you as long as we're good together," the couple with the commitment over and above just their relationship will commit and invest. Those investments will improve the quality of their relationship. So they'll end up with a better relationship than the couple that just sort of said, "Well, let's see what happens. As long as it's good, we'll stay together."
I'm a sociologist, so I see things from the perspective that marriage is a social institution and, as a social institution, it changes people. It changes the choices they make. It changes their behavior and makes them better off in the process on a whole range of dimensions. There's a wealth of literature, much of it on fairly academic studies, that focuses on one little aspect of well-being, but I don't think people have put it together in the past. I see a very large picture of changes, improvements in well-being, brought about by marriage across a range of dimensions.
The dimensions that I'm sure of include physical health and length of life - improvements for both men and women - emotional wellbeing, sexual activity and sexual satisfaction, career benefits, outcomes for children across a range of dimensions, domestic violence, and wealth and assets. What else is there left except maybe beauty?
This is one of the areas where I think our popular conception is really a misconception. When I talk to people about the work I'm doing on marriage, one thing that very often pops up is, "Oh, marriage is good for men and bad for women, right?" But, in fact, the evidence suggests that that's just not true. I feel very strongly about this that, in fact, the evidence suggests that marriage is good for men and good for women. The dimensions may be a little different and the mechanisms may be a little different, but I think it's very hard to say that one gender benefits more than the other.
One thing, as a caveat: It's probably true for physical health that men get larger benefits than women do. For career benefits, I'd say men get career benefits from marriage and women don't. Women don't pay any penalties, but they don't get any career benefits. There are other dimensions where women seem to get more benefits than men.
What benefits do women get? Money is one. Let's be frank. I think money is underrated. One of the things that women get from marriage is they get financial support for themselves and especially for their children. If you look at poverty rates for single mothers, they're quite high. One of the things that's clear is what women do with the financial resources that men bring to marriage. They devote more of their time to their kids.
One could argue that it's one of the things that often women want to do. They want to spend time with their kids, especially when kids are young. Being married allows them to do that. I think one of the reasons that marriage doesn't give women career benefits is that some women trade off higher salary and career advancement for time and attention to their kids. The financial resources of the husband allows them, if they want to do that.
Absolutely. Divorce impacts men, and it's very clear in the data that men who get divorced or become widowed tend to - not all of them - but too many of them experience fairly substantial declines in physical and emotional well-being. That's partly because for a lot of men, their wives ran the household and sort of organized their life. They made sure that meals were on the table, often negotiated medical bureaucracies, kept track of their health, and kept track of their emotional well-being. Another thing that women tend to do in families is to organize the social life
Men often say that their wife is their best friend more than women say their husband is their best friend. Men tend to focus their emotional friendship networks around their wife, or she manages those networks to a much greater extent than women focus their friendship networks around their husbands. So when their wife dies, they can't cook, their household life falls apart, they don't have any friends, they don't have their best friend, and they don't have their emotional support. They eat poorly, they sleep poorly, and then they die.
Is divorce better if parents are not getting along? That's probably true, but it has to be high levels of conflict pretty much in front of the kids. There's a very interesting study that came out a couple of years ago where a team of researchers followed families and the kids over a fifteen-year period. They had measures of how everybody was getting along. Some of these couples divorced and some stayed together. They followed the kids and looked at how many of them went to college, their emotional well-being, and what kind of families they formed themselves. They had many indicators of how the kids were doing. When the divorce ended a high-conflict marriage, the kids were never worse off, and on some dimensions better off. When the divorce ended a moderate or a low-conflict marriage, the kids were never better off and often worse off. That all sounds perfectly reasonable. What they found was only 30 percent of the divorces ended high-conflict marriages. So 70 percent of the divorces made kids worse off.
I think the truth of the matter is that maybe the parents have a relationship that's boring or not emotionally satisfying, but they're good parents; or the parents have a conflictual relationship but they're able to keep it private, and their relationship with the children, each of them, is good. Well, the child, in fact, loses. It's clear that children lose the resources of their father pretty often when parents divorce, and the family has less resources anyway because of the divorce. So as parents divorce, kids are less likely to finish college, for example, and it's clear a lot of it is just there's not the money to pay.
The truth is, children in two-parent families have a lot more resources and it's not just money. They have two people that they can call on for help, for time, and for attention. You want to get a science project done, you have two chances that somebody's going to be able to help you. If somebody is having a bad day, there's somebody there who might not be having a bad day who might be able to help you out.
So parents in two-parent families spell each other. They back each other up. When one of them can't do it, maybe the other one can. They give each other emotional support in their parenting role. So I think, "Jeez, am I doing the right thing?" If you have someone else to bounce the ideas off of, to back you up, to talk about it, it's easier to be consistent, it's easier to follow through, and it's easier to do a good job.
I think that sex is really important. Social scientists are doing a lot of research on sex and it's an important part of life. It's an important part of marriage, and I think we do a disservice to pretend it's not something that people cohabit for and people marry for. This is my research that's coming out soon in a journal: Married men and married women report higher levels of sexual activity than dating men or dating women who are sexually active. They report slightly lower levels of sexual activity than otherwise comparable cohabiting men and women, but they report higher levels of satisfaction, emotional satisfaction from sex.
When you take into account the differences in sexual activity, the differences between married and cohabiting people get bigger. Each sex act is substantially more satisfying to married men and married women. A lot of it for men has to do with just the amount of sexual activity and what they do. For women it seems to be just being married. When you take into account everything else you can think of about them and about their sexual practices, married women still show significantly higher satisfaction with sex than cohabiting or dating women, unless the dating women are engaged.
Sex is really about bonding, about connection. It's partly a physical connection, but it's partly and probably primarily emotional connection. When people are committed to each other, when people have a satisfying relationship that's long-term, that's ongoing, they can relax and be themselves and have a good time in a way that maybe you can't if you just met the guy.