One form of lifestyle that has become rather common is the cohabiting couple, an unmarried couple living together in an intimate sexual relationship. By 1994, there were 3.7 million such cohabiting couples in the United States, an increase of about 3 million couples since 1970, when the idea was still considered new and radical. As the practice of cohabitation has become more widespread in the United States, several researchers have attempted to identify the motivations and effects of this lifestyle. Authorities on the subject have concluded that the increasing prevalence of cohabitation is the result of: more p

A 1991 study by Leora Black and Douglas Sprenkle (1991) compared the attitudes about divorce between young adults who had experienced divorce in their childhood and those from intact homes. The results of this study found that 55% of the divorced group was more favorable to cohabiting before marriage, and were a lot more skeptical about getting married than the intact group. In another study, Bumpass, Martin, and Sweet (1991) found that the rates of disruption were highest among those who married at a young age, those with lower education, and those who cohabited before marriage. It was also found that those who cohabited reported lower quality marriages and lower commitment to the institution of marriage, and that wives who cohabited had more individualistic views of marriage than those whom had not (Thomson & Collela, 1992).

The only studies that did not seem to focus on young adults were the ones that used data from the National Survey of Households, Current Population Survey, General Social Survey, and Study of American Families. The National Survey of Households, General Social Survey, and the Current Population Survey used over 10,000 randomly selected respondents that ranged in social background.

I also believe that the studies should have compared cohabitation years to the number of years married for those who did not cohabit. Even though cohabitation is not a formal arrangement, cohabitors still engage in similar activities as married couples. Living together is a very difficult arrangement, and I believe that this is one of the most stressful steps in a relationship. If you can handle the day-to-day stresses of living together, then you can handle almost anything.

Now that cohabitation has been a popular alternative for the United States for a couple of decades, this behavior is becoming more accepted. The fact that many of these studies were completed 10-30 years ago makes me believe that an updated study should be performed. A more recent study will not only reveal updated views, but it will also be more accepted by the person performing the study to allow for more positive observations.

When research was done for cohabitation there was a great deal of emphasis on marital quality and stability, most of which found that couples who have lived together before marriage have lower marital quality and are more likely to divorce than those who have not cohabited. Unfortunately I noticed that not much research investigated the effects of the length of prior commitment to a relationship to the eventual stability of a marriage. Earlier in the century, advocates of lengthy engagements argued that the couples needed time to be both committed and to consider carefully what they were undertaking (Davidson & Moore, 1992). I believe that it is important to compare relationships that have existed for the same time period, so that the subjects are at similar relational stages. So when comparing cohabiting relationships to non-cohabiting relationships, I think it is necessary to know how long they have known each other. This is important because if subjects are at different relational stages, then they will obviously have different feelings towards each other.

In order to achieve reliable data it is important that researchers adopt a “value free” methodology. When studying a controversial issue like cohabitation it is very difficult for researchers to eliminate preconceptions, that is why they must plan research in consultation with others from differing backgrounds. Most of the studies used information from prior experiments and statistics to compare characteristics of cohabitors. A popular survey, used by many researchers of cohabitation, was the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) (Bumpass, Castro, Sweet/Bumpass, Sweet, Cherlin/Thomson, Colella). The NSFH is a national sample survey of 13,017 respondents, conducted in 1987-1988. The NSFH was designed to provide detailed i

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