Couples who cohabit before marriage are likely to divorce - Study

A new study has revealed that lovers who live together before they marry are more likely to experience divorce, writes GBENGA ADENIJI.

Couples who cohabit before marriage are likely to divorce

It is no longer uncommon to see love birds live together as one before they are legally joined as husband and wife.
This relationship fad is fast gaining more popularity in tertiary institutions - especially where there are no hostels. Thus, the male and female students take solace in sharing accommodation as "couples" for as long as they remain on campus. This is in addition to some "free-minded" individuals who decide to live together before marriage so that they can "understand" themselves better.
However, a research conducted by the United Kingdom-based Christian think-thank group, Jubilee Centre, says lovers who fall into the category of cohabiting as couples before marriage are 'significantly' more likely to end the matrimony in divorce. The study also discovers that more couples are living together than ever before - revealing that the average time of living together before walking each other down the aisle doubles to three-and-a-half years in the past four decades.
The group says that living together has become 'a more fragile state of a relationship than ever before'. It notes that couples who live together before marriage are 45 per cent more likely to separate in the long run than those who wait until after their wedding to start living together.
The study conducted by Dr. John Hayward and Dr. Guy Brandon indicates, "Despite the popularity of cohabitation and its relationship to marriage, it is also the case that marriages that start with a period of prior cohabitation are significantly more prone to divorce than those that do not. Where there has been a previous cohabitation with a separate person by one or both partners, the likelihood of divorce soars.''
It adds that such lovers are six times more likely to split by the time their first child is five. The report titled, 'Cohabitation: An Alternative to Marriage?' further notes that this suggests that cohabitation is now being treated somewhat differently to the way it was in the 1960s and 70s.
The study was carried out among 14,103 households and 22,265 adults, putting the cost of family breakdown to £41.7b (N10m). This is equivalent to £1,350 (N328,000) for every taxpayer each year. It also states that the costs will increase 'significantly' in the next 25 years, with its analysis bordering on about 30,000 family cases drawn from a nationwide survey.
In another research conducted last year, it was discovered that the likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six per cent points if the couple had cohabited first. The study was carried out by the American National Centre for Health Statistics. It involved men and women from ages 15 to 44 and used data from the country's National Survey of Family Growth. The researchers define cohabitation as people who live with a sexual partner of the opposite sex.
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