Another study that tells us we’ve been adulting wrong.
So we were under the impression that marrying someone before living with them is like buying a car without taking it for a test drive.
However, according to a recent study published in The Journal of Family Psychology, has found that this approach has its drawbacks.
In fact, the research found that couples who live together before tying the knot had a far greater chance of divorce than those who didn’t.
We’re still really unhappy about this.
Why?
Well, apparently it’s down to the fact that those who cohabit tend to end up marrying for the wrong reasons.
Researchers explained:
“We think there might be a subset of people who live together before they got engaged who might have decided to get married really based on other things in their relationship, because they were already living together and less because they really wanted and had decided they wanted a future together.”
“We think that some couples who move in together without a clear commitment to marriage may wind up sliding into marriage partly because they are already cohabiting.”
Couples who move in together in order to “test” the commitment tend to have the worst prognosis, with less confidence in the quality and stability of their relationship.
Researcher Galena Rhoades of the University of Denver explains:
“Cohabiting to test a relationship turns out to be associated with the most problems in relationships.
Perhaps if a person is feeling a need to test the relationship, he or she already knows some important information about how a relationship may go over time.”
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