From the Wall Street Journal:
The idea that cohabitation is risky is surprising, given that a majority of young adults believe that living together is a good way to pretest the quality of your partner and your partnership, thereby increasing the quality and stability of your marriage. But a growing body of research indicates that Americans who live together before marriage are less likely to be happily married and more likely to land in divorce court.
In looking at the marital histories of thousands of women across the U.S., we found that women who cohabited were 15% more likely to get divorced. Moreover, a Stanford study indicates that the risk is especially high for women who cohabited with someone besides their future husband. They were more than twice as likely to end up in divorce court.
About this pattern, the psychologist Galena Rhoades of the University of Denver observes, “We generally think that having more experience is better…. But what we find for relationships is just the opposite. Having more experience is related to having a less happy marriage later on.” One reason, her research suggests, is that previous cohabitations may give husbands and wives experience with breaking up from serious coresidential relationships, making them more likely to head for the exit when the going gets tough.
In Prof. Rhoades’s estimation, having a history with other cohabiting partners may also make them compare their spouse critically to previous partners in ways that make them discount their husband or wife. Your husband David may be a responsible and reliable partner—but not as funny as Will or as good a lover as Nate, two other men you lived with prior to marriage. Keeping such critical comparisons in mind once you’re married can be corrosive. (Read more.)
Reclaiming the vocation of marriage. From The Catholic Exchange:
So, returning to our friend who recently took vows as a consecrated virgin – our vocations are a complement to each other, both showing a different side of both the love of God as manifested through the gifts of vocations and serving as images of the love between Christ and the Church, His Bride. The prayers at a wedding Mass are theologically rich and beautiful. Marriage should be entered into with the same kind of gravity and discernment that priesthood and religious life are. The married vocation needs to be reclaimed from what the world says it is – a happy conclusion to the story of two people falling madly in love – to what it actually is – the decision of a man and woman to seek union with God through deeper union with each other. Along with that is the call to embrace to cross, to suffer, to die to self, and ultimately to find a deeper joy in Christ…together. (Read more.)
From The American Conservative:
In the extended social circles to which I belong a great deal of agony surrounds discussions of the so-called “dating scene.” Men are so lazy and so childish, and just look at the icky things they tweet; women are impossible to approach, etc. My own belief is that beneath all the other difficulties real and imagined is risk-aversion. The longer people wait to pair up in the hope of finding the “right” one, the likelier they are to become so settled in their habits—and so neurotic about the opposite sex—that no prospective partner will be capable of ticking all of the ever-increasing number of boxes. It’s better to be young and poor and struggling.
This exhausts my abstract wisdom on the subject. Speaking for myself, I can only say that the case for getting married young is that I was comparatively young when I met the woman with whom I knew I wished to spend the rest of my life.
I first met Lydia ten years ago last fall, when I was 21 and she was 19. We were both students at the same undistinguished Directional State University, I because I had dropped out of high school and drifted into the university out of boredom, she because for someone of her background—daughter of the professional classes in the solidly upper-middle class Detroit suburbs—there was something quaint about living on the edge of the world in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I was an undergraduate tutor on the dime of the English department, she had charmed her way into a job at the library despite not being eligible for work study. I went to school in three-piece suits I had picked up in thrift stores or on eBay; her hair was purple.
To this day she says that her first memory of the stern, handsome older tutor (she exaggerates, surely: I’m usually gentle in conversation) was overhearing me tell someone that, actually, while it had been published during the Regency in 1813, Pride and Prejudice was composed much earlier in the reign of George III. Young men of letters take heart: Somewhere out there is a woman who will appreciate both your reading habits and your pedantry.
A few weeks after this exchange, of which I myself have no memory, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen walked into the undergraduate tutoring center, where I was sitting at a desk doing nothing in particular. She had barely begun filling out the sign-in sheet when I almost shouted, “I’ll take this one.” In retrospect these words seem to admit of an almost literal interpretation.
Curiously enough, I do not remember a single thing that I said about her essay on Anna Karenina, or indeed, anything else from that first conversation. Our second one, however, I will remember until the end of my days. It began in the basement of the library a few weeks later. (A strange trick of memory that I have begun to notice is that pointless details accumulate around certain events, such that to this day I can recall that the book I was not quite reading as she approached me was Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt’s Practicing New Historicism.)
“Are you happy?” she said.
I wanted to say a million things—to ask her to define “happy,” to tell her that happiness however defined had nothing whatever to do with the heavenly felicity that was man’s final end, to tell her that only someone with no social skills would say such a thing to a stranger, to insist that she was being utterly ridiculous. Instead, after what seemed like hours of considering my words, but must in reality have been no more than a few second’s hesitation, I simply replied, “No.”
“Why are you unhappy?”
This conversation, which, thankfully would move on to other subjects, including her hair color, lasted for the next 12 hours, as we moved from the library to a restaurant (I convinced her to skip her evening class) to the harbor and the pier and, finally, the steps of the old lighthouse where we sat until just before dawn. (Read more.)
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