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Why Do People Live Together Rather Than Marry? by Paul Dobransky

Mon, 06/25/2007

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Besides the obvious - that both the man and the woman have cultural reasons or personal experience that made marriage distasteful - I have seen many people enter cohabitation for the wrong reasons.

One most common is out of economic necessity and a desire to wait, or "save money" for a proper wedding. This is a surface reason though. When you think about it, men and women who desperately want something (such as a new car or job), tend to stop at nothing to budget to make it happen.

The more common reason (and reason that a much larger sample of couples fail to stay together when cohabitation happens before marriage), is that neither one is fully ready to commit to the other (or not ready in general for marriage.) This is a temporary stop-gap with pluses and minuses.

On the plus side, the couple may truly learn and cultivate some of the habits of mature collaboration, coordination and compromise that will be needed in a solid marriage.

On the negative, many who cohabitate have doubts about each other from the beginning -ones that are unlikely to resolve on their own, and in some cases may NEVER allow a solid marriage to occur. I cover these fully in The Secret Psychology of How We Fall in Love.

The reason men may make light of the situation is basically that it is instinctually, biologically hard-wired in men NOT to commit, unless there is overwhelming evidence to them that the woman will make a great teammate in life. If this is not intuitively there from the get go, it is not likely to spontaneously arise.

So for many men, this situation affords the ability to have sexual activity and even friendship too, without the risk detected by the masculine instinct, that his "freedom" is lost at greater a cost than it is worth to him.

Men would be advised to only cohabitate if marriage is a definite likely improvement to his quality of life, and women are advised to have already found a strong and compelling evidence that doing so is leading to marriage.

View more information about The Secret Psychology of How We Fall in Love