It’s not unheard of for contemporaneous studies on the same topic to come to opposite conclusions, but it’s somewhat surprising for them to do so after analyzing so much of the same data. Both studies analyzed several cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), a longitudinal dataset of women (and men, starting in 2002) between the ages of 15 and 44, though Kuperberg’s study incorporates some data from another survey as well. Still, this isn’t the first time researchers have come to differing conclusions about the the implications of premarital cohabitation. The phenomenon has been studied for more 25 years, and there’s been significant disagreement from the start as to whether premarital cohabitation increases couples’ risk of divorce. Differences in researchers’ methodology and priorities account for some of that disagreement. But in the curious, still-developing story of whether cohabitation does or doesn’t affect odds of divorce, subjectivity on the part of researchers and the public may also play a leading role.[...]
However, over the years, many researchers began wondering whether earlier findings that linked cohabitation to divorce were a relic of a time when living together before marriage was an unconventional thing to do. Indeed, as cohabitation has become more normalized, it has ceased to be so strongly linked to divorce. Author Steffen Reinhold, of the University of Mannheim’s Research Institute for the Economics of Aging, pointed out in 2010 that in European countries, the correlation disappeared when the cohabitation-before-marriage rate among the married adults reached about 50 percent; the U.S. seemed to have just gotten to this threshold. In 2012, a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family concluded that “since the mid-1990s, whether men or women cohabited with their spouse prior to marriage is not related to marital stability.” This is the same journal that just published a study finding the opposite.
Galena Rhoades, a psychologist at the University of Denver, has a few theories as to why it’s so difficult to glean what effect, if any, cohabitation has on marital stability. For one, she says, it’s hard to study divorce in ways that are useful and accurate, because the best data sets take so long to collect. Many people don’t get divorced until many years into their marriages, and the social norms around cohabitation in the U.S. have evolved quickly, so “if we study a cohort of people who got married 20 years ago, by the time we have the data on whether they got a divorce or not, their experience in living together and their experience of the social norms around living together are from 20 years ago,” Rhoades says. In other words, by the time researchers have enough longitudinal data to know whether one is meaningfully linked to the other, the social norms that shaped the findings will hardly be of use to couples today trying to figure out how how cohabitation could affect their relationship. Thus, Rhoades says, longitudinal studies tend to paint a fuller picture of the relationship between living together and divorce, while also simultaneously telling Americans today less about the time they actually live in.[...]
As researchers moves toward a more nuanced understanding of what cohabitation means for the future of unmarried romantic partners, there are several factors that the experts I spoke with believe urgently need to be taken into account. Lehmiller says studies of cohabitation should start working with data sets that include same-sex couples and move away from equating the stability of a marriage with its success. “Some people have views about marriage that would lead them to stay in one even if it’s not satisfying,” he says. In other words, just because a marriage lasts doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best outcome for either party involved.
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