Cohabitation is almost as common as marriage now. In fact, it is hard to remember a marriage I performed in recent years where the couple was not already living together.
Cohabitation makes sense to a lot of young couples. Many, perhaps most, have seen their parents divorce. Some consider it a "trial marriage," hoping to avoid divorce by not marrying if they turn out to be incompatible. Furthermore, "everybody is doing it," which seems to argue that it must be OK. Besides, postponing all sex until marriage, when sex drives are strong for years before the age when most marry, does not seem to make sense. Is it even normal? Why should people deny themselves something as natural as sex? If "no one gets hurt," or if both are consenting, so that if someone does get hurt, they have already agreed to take that risk, then what is the problem?
If anything is wrong with sex outside of marriage, is it only because it goes against Christian teachings? Except for that, doesn't it make sense? In other words, outside of religion, are there any good reasons not to cohabit? Actually, there are.
First, the personal happiness and well-being of cohabiting couples are statistically at higher risk than that of married people.
Couples who cohabit, then marry, are 50% more likely to divorce than couples who did not cohabit before marrying! [1] The opposite of what might be expected, but well documented and true.
Also, 40% of couples who cohabit do not eventually marry each other. That might seem to avoid the grief of divorce. But the fact is that when they break up, they still go through all the pain of divorce, just as if they had formally married. They only avoid the form of divorce, not the disaster part. (And with 'palimony,' they may not even avoid the financial costs of divorce!)
The rates of physical partner abuse are over 6000% (62 times) greater in cohabitation than in marriage. The rates of physical and sexual abuse of children are also much higher than in marriage. Cohabiting couples are less healthy and have shorter lives than married couples. They are less prosperous, as a group. And - unkindest of all - both male and female partners report being less happy, and - having less sex, even less-satisfying sex - than married couples do! So the search for better and more sex - the elephant in the room in all this argument - fares worse in unmarried sex than in married sex!
On the basis of our purely personal gratification, then, unmarried sex scores far below married sex. On a purely objective, well-documented basis, ignoring any religious reasons to wait for sex until marriage, the disadvantages of cohabitation are far greater than any advantages.
Why would this be? One factor is the element of trust. How can there a truly satisfying relationship when both know that either might leave at any time for any reason? How can there be any depth in the relationship without trust? And how can there be trust without commitment? Statistically, only marriage brings the level of commitment needed for a happier relationship.
Second, wide-spread unmarried sex ruins countries.
Anyone who claims to care for their country, for the poor or about children, and who also has unmarried sex, is actively harming, not helping, all of these. That is because It turns out that unmarried sex by a large part of the population is one of the most disasterous things that can happen to a country. Why is that? And how do we know?
Because we now know that fatherlessness is the motor driving most poverty and most violent crime. Because fatherlessness has increased from 5% of all births in 1960 to 33% in 2000. And because unmarried sex, since the "Sexual Revolution" of the 1960s, has been the motor driving fatherlessness. (Leaving aside that unmarried sex is also the proximate cause of most abortions.)
How do we know? Fatherlessness is the major predictor of poverty, since most of the poor are never-married mothers and their children. Fatherlessness has also become the major predictor of violent crime, as 70% of the most violent young offenders in prison are fatherless.
And these are just the secular, non-religious reasons for postponing sex until marriage. What are the religious reasons for denying sex to ourselves until we marry?
The Bible is clear that there is to be no sex outside marriage. That if two single people have sex, they must marry. These strictures may be a major reason for the drive to prove the Bible is not true, or at least, not totally true! But there is no question that this is the standard shown by the plain sense of the scripture.
And who is a disciple? The one who is trying hard to obey Christ. Can disciples then have sex outside marriage? Or cohabit instead of marrying? Only if they repent and change their ways.
In short, the choice is to be a disciple or to cohabit (or continue to cohabit.) But doing both at the same time is not possible. Cohabiting Christians who also want to follow Christ need to understand, rethink and obey him. He is the Lord of the sexual part of our lives as well as the rest.
And obeying these commands is not as bad as it seems at first. It will actually work out better. Even when what God wants seems to be bad for us, we can trust that it is the only way that will work out well. It is all part of trusting him, not only with our eternal souls, but with having the best possible life here on this earth as well.
___________
[1] For this and all other statistical documentation, please see the footnotes for Chapter 6, "Sex and Poverty" of "Up and Out: A Guide to True Compassion for the Poor", (under "Categories") either at www.gerrycharlottephelps.com or www.upandout.us.
[2] For cohabiting couples who repent and want to marry, most I have known wanted to wait to marry until they could have the big wedding they had dreamed about. And while most decided to continue living together, determined to postpone any further sex until then, they found that did not work.
One solution that worked for such repentant, cohabiting couples was a quiet, "private" wedding first, with just them, the pastor, whatever number of witnesses were legally required, and a properly executed wedding license. That way, they continued to live together, married in the eyes of God and of the state, but "secretly" so far as others were concerned, until the big, public wedding of their dreams. Not ideal, but it helped some of them achieve the obedience to Christ that they had chosen. (There were many such "secret" weddings, or "elopements," for various reasons, as late as the 1940s.)
Some of the problems: First, giving a bad witness to others, especially young people, by appearing to live together without being married, and thereby supporting the practice of cohabitation, even though actually married. Second, fooling all those friends and family members into thinking the big wedding later was the real one.
Comments