I’ve
seen this kind of stat before, but I happened to stumble on this
page - an article informing us that in the United States a couple that does
not live together prior to getting married has a 20 percent chance of being
divorced within five years, whereas if the couple has lived together
beforehand, that number jumps to 49 percent. In other words, a couple is
nigh-on two and a half times more likely to divorce if they live together
beforehand.
Clearly
all the indication is that the try before you buy method doesn’t guard against
the marriage ending - quite the opposite it would appear. If you’re still in
your nascent stages of economics, you might be tempted to ask the question:
what is it about living together prior to marriage that increases your chances
of being a divorcee? But a better way of doing economic analysis is to first
realise that it may not be the living together premaritally that increases the
probability of divorce, it may well be, and in fact almost certainly is, more
distal factors associated with what kind of people live together before
marriage and which do not.
For
example, many Christians who would not live together before marriage for
faith-based reasons are likely to be the kind of people that take marriage
seriously enough not to divorce. By equal measure, many couples who will easily
disregard any (admittedly declining) social norms about pre-marital
co-habitation will probably just as equally disregard any (admittedly
declining) social norms about the stigma of divorce too. A corollary of this is
that if you are the sort of person who easily disregards social norms, you are
perhaps more likely to be the sort of person who more easily disregards
niceties and mindful considerations that keep a marriage safe from divorce.
