You may not have heard a little-known fact that’s well-known in the field of sociology: Couples who live together before they marry (what social scientists call “cohabitation”) are more likely to divorce. Why? This is intrinsically odd (counterintuitive, if you like), because you’d think these couples would already have been exposed to each other’s character flaws, annoying habits, views on money, desire for children, etc., and therefore would be more, not less, likely to succeed in marriage. If the couple has issues, weak areas of communication, secret resentments, or unacceptable views, wasn’t all that apparent in the living situation? And yet couples who live together and then marry are more likely to divorce than those who’d lived apart and presumably knew each other less well.

The fact is that no one knows why this is so. There are theories about this, but they’re mostly lame. I have my own theory, and of course I don’t think it’s lame.

My explanation is that we can tolerate the barely tolerable while living together because we expect less, whereas we demand a great deal more of marriage, besides the lifelong commitment – and those expectations are not necessarily articulated, just assumed. After all, we have silent expectations of almost all our primary relationships: parents’ expectations of children, children’s of parents, boss of employees –even friends have goal posts and boundaries they presume are similar without discussion. For example, I wouldn’t tell my friend that I don’t like the color she painted her wall, or that I think my boyfriend, who she hasn’t met, sounds boring (both of these are from real life), and when my friends told me this, I’ve been annoyed, even angry: Hey, who asked you? Yet in their own view, they were not rude to make their evaluations known, which is why both friends tossed these opinions at me casually. No one says to a new friend: “Here’s my list of do’s and don’ts for friendship in advance, and it includes not commenting negatively on my home, my relatives, or my love life, unless I ask for your opinion.” You just trust that you know what’s acceptable to the other, and that should be enough. But when you don’t meet my standard for what you owe me as a friend, or where to draw a line, it’s awkward at best, and sometimes downhill from there into mutual animosity and mistrust. This is certainly true of romantic couples as well.

Since friendship is rarely as intense and exclusive as the lifelong marriage that many aspire to, holding secret, even unconscious, expectations of your spouse or what marriage should entail can be much harder on the relationship. Even if you’re aware of tension or conflict, your limits may be harder to articulate, because you don’t want to fight with this person who is all-important to your future. Yet once married, anything can change: how often you have sex, how you relate to the in-laws you’re stuck with for life, how you handle shared income (or whether you prefer not to share), how often you should be going out with friends, leaving the spouse behind. Can you go to a movie with a friend without checking to see if the spouse wants to go with you instead? You may agree beforehand not to have children, and then one might change his or her mind and feel it’s necessary for their happiness. Or you may be on the same page as to where you live to begin with, but someone gets a job that’s a continent away, and who gets to decide if that’s a priority?

The higher risk of divorce for cohabiters is still true even though attitudes about “living together” have changed enormously since the 80s, according to studies. When I was in college, my mother would not allow me to live with a girlfriend (I might have had male visitors, wow!), never mind live with a boyfriend. Parents in those days warned their daughters that a man would not “buy the cow when the milk was free,” meaning if you allow a man to have sex with you before marriage, he would never marry you…which presumes men married because it was the only way they could get sex. It’s nice that we’ve left that mostly behind, thanks to feminism and the sexual revolution. I hope you’re not familiar with that cow and her milk.

In our time, cohabitation seems entirely normalized, but if anything, the picture has become even stranger: more recent studies show that living together is now followed by a lower risk of divorce in the first year of marriage, but only for the first year – and then there’s a higher risk. I personally know of two or three couples who lived together seemingly happily and then divorced after two or three years of marriage. Why is the first year more “successful” than the norm for the cohabiters, but not the years following? Alas, I have no explanation for that. I’m out of theories.

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