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I’m wondering if this isn’t the most fascinating week ever for couples counselors, as even more information comes out about whether living together is a good idea.  But maybe they don’t share my fascination with the debate over whether living together first leads to a rocky marriage.  Or Scott Stanley, a researcher into couples counseling who recently provided some updated comments to www.SmartMarriages.com based on his long-term research.

The debate is set against photos in the New York Times of gay and lesbian couples triumphantly holding their marriage licenses aloft in the very capital of the United States of America.   For me that means that as I write about marriage, maybe I am now indeed writing information which is interesting to all the couples in this nation at least

Scott Stanley pointed out that much of the research published recently appears to be reaching completely different conclusions.  Just last week I wrote a blog post “Is Marriage bad for Couples Therapists”   about British survey that showed how cohabitation with the arch-enemy of long-term relationships, and pointing out the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) didn’t necessarily agree.  Then just yesterday the CDC released a report picked by USA today: “Cohabiting has little effect on couple’s success in marriage”.

Complex?  Confusing?  Oh- yes!  Does it mean that money upfront on diamonds saves on couples counseling later?

Writing on the SmartMarriages newsletter, Stanley offered an explanation.  Like many things, if you look a little deeper it starts to make more sense.  Apparently there’s a thing called the inertia effect.  You meet someone nice, you get close, next thing you know you are spending all your time in one apartment.  Then you figure you might as well let the other apartment go and pool your resources.  Now one of you is pushing for a little more commitment.  “Well – what’s it to be- get married or find somewhere else to live?” they think.   OK, so that’s a bit extreme – but the argument goes a little like that.  This group of cohabiters apparently drift into marriage, with no clearly defined commitment step along the way.  Perhaps they even go their own separate ways again without even seeing a couples therapist – but I’m not sure there is research to back that up.

Then there’s the other group of cohabiting couples.  They fall in love, date, get engaged, and then move in together ahead of the wedding.  According to Stanley, this group stays married just as long as people who never cohabited before walking down the aisle.  It’s that other group who lived together before getting engaged who turn up more frequently in the divorce statistics.  And it is them who provide the data quited by those who argue that cohabitation = bad; marriage =good.

I’m a bit reluctant to put two and two together and draw a conclusion, but it you read my post about the UK Jubilee project study, they said that if you look at couples with children,  cohabiting couples are ten times more likely to break-up than married couple.  That’s exceptionally bad news for the children - as there’s plenty of research around to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that children develop better if their parents stay together. 

I think this is an issue which is all about how people make commitments to each other.  Is it clear, or vague?   Harville Hendrix PhD, who co-founded Imago, talks about how once people make a real commitment to their partner, relationship problems can quickly follow.  And in Hendrix’s view of marriage- that can be a good thing!  That’s because relationship issues give a couple the chance to grow into a deeper connection, and develop a far more powerful love.  He even goes so far as to say that the emerging purpose of marriage in our society is for people to experience conflict as a pathway to growth.  So if you don’t commit well, you may not stay together well.

Commitment to a lifetime partner tends to go hand in hand with raised levels of expectation.  While working as a couples counselor, Hendrix often found that couples who had been perfectly happy before marriage, entered into a power-struggle just after saying “I do”.  Hendrix believes that there’s a part of us that dreams of what it would be like to be fully loved, and when we first fall in love we get a taste of what that might be like.  But once married – then we fully expect to experience this complete love, and of course are disappointed.  It’s tough to discover that my partner isn’t ready to give me the love I want- and that’s why commitment often triggers relationship problems.

The magic of good couples counseling is to help couples through this power-struggle, so that commitment becomes the start, and a deeper and enduring love becomes the result.

By the way, I lived with my partner before asking her to marry me.  We’ve been married 12 years and its fantastic.  But the biggest arguments we ever had we about commitment and the process of getting engaged to be married.