Living with your spouse before marriage isn’t a risk factor for divorce — sleeping around is
Conn Carroll
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Should you move in with your sweetheart before you get married?
That’s totally up to you. But as long as this is your first time moving in with a romantic partner, don’t worry: It won’t raise your chances of getting divorced.
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For years, studies showed that couples who lived together before marriage were more likely to get divorced than couples that didn’t. But those older studies are from an age when just 10% of married couples lived together before marriage. Cohabitation was a novelty in the 70s.
Today, 76% of married couples live together before marriage, and more recent research shows that couples that live together first are no more likely to divorce than couples that don’t.
Not all studies agree. One recent Stanford University study found that while cohabiting couples were actually less likely to divorce in the first year of marriage, pre-marriage cohabiting couples were more likely to get divorced after 10, 15, and 20 years.
So if you want the best chances of not getting divorced, does that mean you should never move in with your boyfriend/girlfriend?
Not really. Here’s why: When you drill down into that Stanford study, you see that not all cohabitations are created equal. Women who had cohabited with other men before they cohabited with their husband, and women who cohabited with other men but not with their husband, were much more likely to get divorced than women who did not cohabit before marriage. But women who only cohabited with their eventual husbands were just as likely to get divorced as those who never cohabited.
For example, by year four of marriage, 12.5% of women who cohabited with other men but not with their husbands got divorced. For women who cohabited with other men and their husbands, that number was 8%. But for both women who never cohabited and women who cohabited but only with their husband, the number was 3%.
We see a similar pattern in marriage success related to the number of sex partners one has over their lifetime. If you are a woman who wants to still be married by age 40, the optimal number of men to have slept with before your wedding night is not zero. It is in fact one — meaning your husband is your only sex partner. Ninety-five percent of women who have only ever had sex with their husbands were still married by age 40.
Women with two total sex partners (meaning they slept with their husband and some other man before marriage) were the second most likely to still be married at age 40, at 89%. Virgins actually came in third at 87%. And then, from that point on, every additional partner adds more risk for divorce.
So if you want to get married and you want your marriage to last, you don’t necessarily have to wait till your wedding night to have sex. But don’t go around sleeping with everyone either because that is the statistical path toward divorce.