University of Iowa Discovers Starling Link between Teen Sex and Divorce

[MCWAY]

If 3000 Christians get married and 1000 get divorced and that's compared to 500 atheists getting married and 250 get divorced then Atheists would have a higher rate, but there would be more Christians getting divorced.

So my question isn't about who has more marriages or divorces.  Obviously, there are far more "Christian Marriages"  My question is who has a higher (or lower) rate? (percentage)

I answered your question. See my reply to Loco.

And, it appears that more universities are "discovering" the blatantly obvious again!!

FIRST-PERSON: Cohabitation & divorce -- there is a correlation
 

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (BP) -- How many computers or cars do you think Toshiba and Toyota would sell if they didn't let you test them out first? Who in their right mind would make a big commitment of purchase without trying it out first?

But don't we do the same with marriage? We ask young people to make one of the biggest commitments of their lives -- rivaled only by their decision to become parents -- without any prior experience of what marriage is actually like.

More than 60 percent of marriages today are preceded by some form of cohabitation. And 75 percent of current cohabitors enter these relationships with some plans toward marriage, even seeing this live-in relationship as a smart move toward marriage. But does the experience of cohabiting teach couples things that help make them better spouses once they do marry? Does cohabitation contribute to stronger, happier marriages?

Unfortunately, it does not. Not even close!

This is a rare instance where there's a Grand Canyon sized chasm between what many young adults believe and the proven reality of their experience. And it is not the moralizing preachers and traditionalists saying so. A massive body of robust, diverse and conclusive scientific research on this question leaves no doubt about whether cohabiting is helpful to marriage. Graduate and postdoctoral seminars in sociology are held on this topic, and this is what they learn.

Sociologists investigating this question -- working from two leading schools of sociology, the Universities of Chicago and Michigan -- tell us clearly that the "expectation of a positive relationship between cohabitation and marital stability ... has been shattered in recent years by studies conducted in several Western countries, including Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United States."

Their data indicates that people with cohabiting experience who marry have a 50 to 80 percent higher likelihood of divorcing than married couples who never cohabited. A Canadian sociologist explains:

"Contrary to conventional wisdom that living together before marriage will screen out poor matches and therefore improve subsequent marital stability, there is considerable empirical evidence demonstrating that premarital cohabitation is associated with lowered marital stability."

After surveying the data on this question, another leading scholar contends that the only conclusion one could honestly reach was to wholesale "reject the argument" that cohabitation contributes to stronger marriages.

In fact, if a couple wanted to substantially increase their likelihood of divorcing, there are few things they could do to so efficiently guarantee such an outcome than live together before marriage. In fact, this is such a consistent finding in the social science research that scholars have coined a term for it: "the cohabitational effect."

This finding has become a truism partly because the process of cohabiting itself is shown to influence couples to learn to communicate, negotiate and settle differences in ways that are less healthy and honest than do couples who didn't cohabit before marriage. This is probably because without a clearly defined relationship, the cohabiting couple can learn to be more controlling and manipulative with each other. And this leads to relational resentment and mistrust.

And this has nothing to do with social acceptance or rejection of living together. Doctors Claire Kamp-Dush and Paul Amato conducted a unique investigation that tracked two groups of cohabitors who eventually married: one that married between 1964 and 1980 and another that did so between 1981 and 1997. This allowed them to see if there were any changes in the cohabitation effect as cohabitation became more common and more accepted by society.

But they found "there was little evidence that the negative consequences of cohabitation dissipated over time as cohabitation became more prevalent." Even after controlling for various social and economic factors that could account for such a difference, they discovered premarital cohabitors in both groups were significantly more likely to have lower levels of marital happiness, more marital conflict, and higher levels of divorce.

"One of the most clearly defined correlates of cohabitation is an increased risk of marital dissolution," says professor Jay Teachman of Western Washington University. In a more recent examination of cohabitation's impact, he calls cohabitation one of the most "robust predictors of marital dissolution" -- making living together first one of the worst things you can do for your marriage. Teachman also warns that even premarital sex by itself is associated with an increased risk of marital disruption, though at lower rates than living together before marriage.

A 2010 "meta-analysis" looked at 26 peer-reviewed, published studies that followed various couples over time. This analysis found that marrieds who had cohabiting pasts were more likely to face divorce, and that "noncohabitors seem to have more confidence in the future of their relationship, and have less accepting attitudes toward divorce."

And as with other studies, the married couples with no cohabiting past are less likely to engage in aggressive and negative interactions, experience more overtly positive interactions, and enjoy more positive communications. These researchers conclude, based on their review of the best studies to date:

"The major practical implication of this review is that psychologists can inform the public, that despite popular belief, cohabitation is generally associated with negative outcomes both in terms of marital quality and marital stability...."

You see, marriage is not a consumer product that you give a try to see how it suits you. Marriage is a leaving of all other relationships to give yourself completely to your beloved. Cohabitation says, "I'm not sure about you. Can I give you test-drive to see what I think?" Melts your hearts doesn't it, ladies? Marriage says, "I want all of you and I want to give all of myself to you!" This is why cohabitation and marriage are such very different kinds of relationships. It is why the social sciences have come to the conclusions they have about living together before marriage being a poor and unhealthy idea.

http://www.bpnews.net/BPFirstPerson.asp?ID=36263

[kcballer]

Haha no agenda there right?

Your argument is bunk and bullsh*t.

[MCWAY]

Haha no agenda there right?

Your argument is bunk and bullsh*t.

Earth to KC. It isn't just my argument.

Plus, this is hardly the first time scientific studies have confirm what we've known all along about people shacking up.

But, just to shoot down yet another pitiful excuse of yours:

Study Finds Cohabiting Doesn’t Make a Union Last


Couples who live together before they get married are less likely to stay married, a new study has found. But their chances improve if they were already engaged when they began living together.

The likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first, the study found.

The study of men and women ages 15 to 44 was done by the National Center for Health Statistics using data from the National Survey of Family Growth conducted in 2002. The authors define cohabitation as people who live with a sexual partner of the opposite sex.

“From the perspective of many young adults, marrying without living together first seems quite foolish,” said Prof. Pamela J. Smock, a research professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “Just because some academic studies have shown that living together may increase the chance of divorce somewhat, young adults themselves don’t believe that.”

The authors found that the proportion of women in their late 30s who had ever cohabited had doubled in 15 years, to 61 percent.

Half of couples who cohabit marry within three years, the study found. If both partners are college graduates, the chances improve that they will marry and that their marriage will last at least 10 years.

“The figures suggest to me that cohabitation is still a pathway to marriage for many college graduates, while it may be an end in itself for many less educated women,” said Kelly A. Musick, a professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell.

Couples who marry after age 26 or have a baby eight months or more after marrying are also more likely to stay married for more than a decade.

“Cohabitation is increasingly becoming the first co-residential union formed among young adults,” the study said. “As a result of the growing prevalence of cohabitation, the number of children born to unmarried cohabiting parents has also increased.”

By the beginning of the last decade, a majority of births to unmarried women were to mothers who were living with the child’s father. Just two decades earlier, only a third of those births were to cohabiting couples.

The study found that, over all, 62 percent of women ages 25 to 44 were married and 8 percent were cohabiting. Among men, the comparable figures were 59 percent and 10 percent.

In general, one in five marriages will dissolve within five years. One in three will last less than 10 years. Those figures varied by race, ethnicity and sex. The likelihood of black men and women remaining married for 10 years or more was 50 percent. The probability for Hispanic men was the highest, 75 percent. Among women, the odds are 50-50 that their marriage will last less than 20 years.

The survey found that about 28 percent of men and women had cohabitated before their first marriage and that about 7 percent lived together and never married. About 23 percent of women and 18 percent of men married without having lived together.

Women who were not living with both of their biological or adoptive parents at 14 were less likely to be married and more likely to be cohabiting than those who grew up with both parents.

The share who had ever married varied markedly by race and ethnicity: 63 percent of white women, 39 percent of black women and 58 percent of Hispanic women. Among men in that age group, the differences were less striking. Fifty-three percent of white men, 42 percent of black men and 50 percent of Hispanic men were married or had been previously married at the time of the survey.

By their early 40s, most white and Hispanic men and women were married, but only 44 percent of black women were.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/us/03marry.html