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You might think the question about the link between premarital cohabitation and divorce would be settled, but researchers have puzzled about it for decades. Part of why the issue draws so much interest is that the vast majority of people believe that living together before marriage should improve the odds of doing well even though most research on the subject has not supported that belief. This is an update on the long-running saga of research on the cohabitation effect.
In 2018, Michael Rosenfeld and Katharina Roesler of Stanford published a study that contradicted the growing consensus in sociology that premarital cohabitation was no longer associated with greater odds of divorce, even though it had been associated with poorer marital outcomes for decades. The explanation various scholars had given for the cohabitation effect going away is based on the diffusion perspective, which suggests that cohabitation has become so common it no longer selects for those already at higher risk, and also that it has lost the stigma it once had, leading to more acceptance by friends and family. But Rosenfeld and Roesler’s study showed that the association between premarital cohabitation and divorce has not declined over the years in any substantial manner.
In a prior article on Rosenfeld and Roesler’s 2018 publication, Galena Rhoades and I described the study and competing theories for why living together before marriage can be associated with lower odds of success in marriage (i.e., selection, experience, and inertia). Rosenfeld and Roesler also showed something new, that cohabitation before marriage was associated with a lower risk for divorce in the first year of marriage but higher risk thereafter. That suggested it could give couples a very short-lived leg up at the very start of marriage. But not so much, thereafter.
Rosenfeld and Roesler’s study caused a stir in the field, and this past December, the Journal of Marriage and Family published two pieces related to their 2018 findings. The first is a comment on the study by Wendy Manning, Pamela Smock, and Arielle Kuperberg and the second is a response by Rosenfeld and Roesler.
The Critique by Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg
In their critique, Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg make two primary criticisms of Rosenfeld and Roesler’s study. First, they argue that their statistical models include multiple and confounding measures of time. Second, Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg emphasize how crucial they believe it to be (because of the data set they are all using) to focus on only the first 10 years of marriage. They disagree with a number of the sampling and analytic decisions made by Rosenfeld and Roesler. They present further analyses in their response and stand by their claim that the cohabitation effect has disappeared.
Rosenfeld and Roesler’s Reply
Rosenfeld and Roesler state that Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg misinterpreted how time-related variables had been handled in their study, and note that their critics could have just asked for more clarification. More importantly, they assert that prior works (and new analyses by Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg) leave out 70% of the relevant sample because of their age and marriage duration restrictions. Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg were also not able to replicate that first year of marriage effect, though Rosenfeld and Roesler point out that their critique actually does display evidence for it. Overall, they believe various decisions by their critics lead to analyses that are less likely to find the increased risk for divorce.
Filtering out the couples who have been married longer (as MSK do) enhances the Recent Cohort Fallacy because in the very early stages of marriages, premarital cohabitation reduces the risk of marital breakups. (p. 6)
Rosenfeld and Roesler also assert that Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg do not adequately account for the timing of children. This is important because children make couples somewhat more likely to remain together (at least for a while), and recent cohabiters who marry are much more likely to already have children than was true for couples in the past.
Rosenfeld and Roesler’s stand by their conclusion that the average increased risk for divorce associated with premarital cohabitation is mostly unchanged over 40 years.
Comment and Implications
Although most people believe cohabitation should improve one’s odds of marital success, Rosenfeld and Roesler suggest this may only be true very early in marriage. Questions abound. Are marital outcomes truly worse for those who live together before marriage, and, if so, for whom? For example, it is less clear that things work the same way, on average, for African Americans who cohabit, and economic disadvantage is deeply embedded in how cohabitation relates to risk in marriage.
But why is there any association with risk at all? As Manning, Smock, and Kuperberg note, the long-accepted conclusion in sociology is that differences in marital outcomes based on premarital cohabitation are due to selection—that the added risk is really about who cohabits and who does not. Selection is surely a large part of the story, but that’s only part of the story (see this for more).
I believe Rosenfeld and Roesler get the better of the debate. I have not found the argument for why the overall cohabitation effect would disappear all that compelling because that is not consistent with either of the most compelling theories of risk that are probable effects net of selection: changes in attitudes and inertia. My colleague Galena Rhoades and I are leading proponents of the latter theory. Inertia emphasizes that when two people move in together, all other things being equal, they are making it harder to break up. Some couples are, in essence, increasing the constraints to remain together (including, for some, on into having children and marrying) prior to dedication being clear, mutual, and high. We believe that is part of why waiting until marriage, or at least engagement, is associated with lower risk in seven studies. For those who move in together before figuring out their future—making it more likely they are going to have a future, anyway—what has happened in recent decades to make that risk go away?
It is worth noting that all of the studies related to whether or not the cohabitation effect still exists focus only on the odds of divorce and not on marital quality. In one of our studies, Galena Rhoades and I show that marital quality is lower among those who started living together before engagement or marriage (as inertia theory predicts), and in marriages occurring during the period of time when others have argued that the overall cohabitation effect no longer exists.
These studies and the arguments about them show how important researcher degrees of freedom are in determining reported findings we end up reading about. Findings are at the tail end of a great many consequential decisions by the researchers.
Rosenfeld and Roesler note that the extraordinary complexity of changes in marriage and cohabitation in the last five decades make it impossible to account for all that may matter when studying this subject. And, I’d add, there is no experiment one can conduct to prove X leads to Y. Would you participate in an experiment where researchers randomly assigned you to either path A or path B to study the differences in outcomes over the course of your life? Me either.
As Rosenfeld and Roesler put it, “... all models of complex reality are flawed” (p. 3). Count on that, and count on the interesting saga of research on premarital cohabitation to continuing.
