Cohabitation vs. marriage

Ampersand has a post where he examines one of the points that right-wingers love to make about the wages of sin--the fact that live-in boyfriends are more likely to abuse than husbands. I had actually never heard this before, though I wasn't particularly surprised. Amp has a number of good reasons that this statistic is being used wrongly, the major one being that marriage is no preventive to abuse. By making this a "wages of sin" issue, the right is implying that a woman just needs to redeem the relationship by getting a ring involved and the hitting will stop.

He also points out that measurable differences in age, length of relationship, etc. probably skew the numbers pretty badly, too. I would add that the conservative view of cohabitation and marriage as an either/or thing is probably messing with the numbers as well. Many couples nowadays both cohabitate and live as married at different points in their relationships. My guess is that a number of abusers reveal their tendencies after the couple moves in together but before the scheduled wedding date, causing the woman to break off the relationship before the marriage. Which would skew the numbers in cohabitative relationships even higher.

But all this got me to thinking about the underlying assumptions that drive the desire to compare cohabitation with marriage. The thing about the whole cohabitation/marriage thing is a false dichotomy that needs to be exposed. Even people who don't see cohabitation as a negative thing still tend to view it as a lesser version of marriage, and therefore lump all cohabitating couples into one group. But the reality of the situation is that there are many different "flavors" of cohabitation, and these differences get obscured a good deal of the time in these polls.

For one thing, I'll bet pinning down a good definition of "living together" is tough to do. My definition is almost surely markedly different than say, Pat Robertson's. If nothing else, I'd bet his definition would be all about the premarital sex whereas I would be looking at stuff like whether or not they maintain separate residences. But is a couple living together only if they share a primary residence? Nowadays it's very common for a couple to basically live in one's house but hang onto the other's as a safety valve of sorts, especially early on in the relationship. I have known couples who move in together before a marriage who don't consider themselves to be cohabitating, because they still view it as lesser than marriage, and they are going to be married. Also, I knew a couple that lived together in the same apartment before marriage but for religious reasons actually refrained from sleeping in the same bedroom or having sex before they married.

Even if you can settle on a definition of what kind of residence they must share in order to be considered cohabitating, there are still huge differences between different couples' relationships. If nothing else, how do you account for different kinds of commitments? With marriage, it's safe to assume that most married couples intend to commit for life--if nothing else, that's what they say when they stand up and take their vows. But cohabitating couples have less public arrangements and it's hard to know what those arrangements are. Some are cohabitating with the intention to marry one day, some view themselves as commited for life but are not marrying for whatever reason, and some live together but don't expect to stay together in any permanent sort of way. And some couples are even more in the gray than that--it's not altogether uncommon to meet couples where one thinks they are in one sort of relationship but the other perceives it differently.

I think a lot of disapproval of cohabitation has as much as, if not more, to do with people's dislike of ambiguity as it does with any real disapproval of extra-marital sex. That's why engaged couples can believe that they aren't "cohabitating" when they are--they are engaged, a date is set, the ambiguity is gone. There isn't the anxiety and the questions about when you're going to make it "official". That's why the continued disapproval of couples who live together without being married is so distressing. After all this time, why can't people just relax and accept that other people's relationships?