Sliding Into Cohabitation Before Marriage

Sliding into Cohabitation without Commitment

The popularity of sliding into cohabitation started increasing in young couples after the 1960s “Decades of Protest” by changing the expectations in gender roles as women joined the work force, and the age in which couples married increased. The convenience of sharing bills as well as other resources, greater intimacy, and testing the relationship makes it even more appealing for young couples to share a home. Even though living together without any real commitment may seem advantages on both partners, the cohabitation effect states couples who live together before marriage tend to be less satisfied when married and are likelier to divorce. The reason why cohabitation in most cases doesn’t work out is due to lack of agreement of what cohabitation means in the relationship.

Young couples in early adulthood tend to slide into cohabitation without commitment and this hurts future potential for a good and lasting marriage. Sliding into cohabitation is easy and progresses as couples sleep over more often and eventually start living together due to the appeal of paying less for housing and

Young couples get too dependent and financially invested in the cohabitation as they start acquiring shared furniture, pets, friends, and other services such as cable and wifi that it is hard to take the step to move out once the romantic relationship gets rocky or stagnant. One partner may feel locked in even when the relationship is not working, because moving out and breaking the relationship means starting over and having to pay more expenses alone once independent. The term “relationship inertia” refers to when a couple after cohabitation ends up in a bad marriage because of the difficult of splitting due to dependence on the partnership without real love in between the