Why cohabit, you can as well wait

Mercy Ngwebvu
WHILE we thought we would get feedback about male circumcision and other issues related to it, one lady instead chose to ask whether or not cohabiting is a good trial-marriage.After quite a number of interviews, it was concluded that cohabitation is just but a halfway relationship which can be dissolved more easily than a marriage.

There is the old and common expression which says: “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” It is indeed an ugly phrase, but there is some truth to the message.

Living together results in regular, no-strings sex for the man, thereby removing the sexual motivation that is part of a marriage proposal.

And don’t worry about his proposing just to bed you — there are too many sexually available women out there for a man to propose marriage just for sexual release.

While some women may choose to turn a deaf ear, the ones we spoke to concurred with this.

“At one point I had a boyfriend with whom I lived in for two good years, but he never popped the question like I expected him to and we eventually broke up. It was because he was cheating on me with some other girl while I stayed at home playing wife for him,” said a woman we interviewed.

Living together before marriage means the man doesn’t have to pursue his girlfriend any longer.

And if something is too easily acquired, it just doesn’t hold the same value as something that is more challenging to get.

“Well, we are not married so it doesn’t really matter,” or “I just married her because she wouldn’t shut up about it,” or “I only proposed because everyone expected me to.”

This lack of enthusiasm and passion displayed by men who live in with their partner before marriage is as depressing as it is discouraging.

Because it removes much of a man’s motivation to make the formal commitment of marriage within a reasonable time, living together often causes women to feel frustrated and get stuck in a cycle of hope and disappointment.

Christmas comes and she hopes for a ring, only to be disappointed. Her birthday comes and she hopes for a ring, only to be disappointed. Her sister gets married and she hopes for a ring, only to be disappointed.

Even worse, this cycle often leads to ultimatums — Marry me or it’s over! — which, in turn, can lead to a reluctant and passionless groom or, just as bad, a woman who tries to fool herself into believing that “marriage is just a piece of paper” so that she doesn’t have to break up with a man who calls her bluff.

Couples who live together are less likely to get married. Co-habiting couples also tend to have a more lax attitude toward commitment and don’t work as hard to stay together.

When their relationship goes through a rough patch — as all relationships do — it is all too easy to just walk away. The legal and public commitment of marriage motivates couples to work through conflict, strengthen the relationship and stay together.

We also learnt that living together is not a reliable way to predict long-term compatibility or marital success. In fact, couples who live together before marriage divorce at higher rates.

There are other ways to set yourself up for a happy, healthy marriage. Serious dating allows two people to get to know each other as loving friends and determine whether they have a reasonable chance of being a faithful, respectful and co-operative couple.

Studies show that people who have multiple cohabiting relationships before marriage are more likely to experience more negative communication in marriage, lower levels of marital satisfaction; the erosion over time of the perceived value of marriage, higher perceived marital instability, lower levels of male commitment to spouse and greater likelihood of divorce than people who do not cohabit before marriage.

The reason cohabitation may set up couples for failure in marriage is because cohabitation is just a test. Since all couples suffer from some incompatibility, when the other partner “fails” the test, the person moves on to the next partner.

A succession of cohabitation failures results in an inability to maintain commitment, the most important part of a marriage relationship.

Men and women have very different ideas about what living together means. Women typically see it as an almost inevitable step toward marriage, while men see it as a no-obligation “test drive.”

Couples who initiate a live-in relationship under the fog of such contradictory assumptions are already in trouble.
Very few unmarried couples who have children end up staying together. In other words, a child’s chances of living in the same home as his or her biological but non-married parents until they are a teenager, are slim.

Of those couples that do keep their relationships intact until their children are grown, 93 percent of them are legally married.

This is important because children who are raised by both biological parents in a low-conflict home are more likely to be emotionally and psychologically healthy than children whose parents are co-habiting or divorced.

They are less likely to experience mental health or behavioural problems, or to live in poverty.

Besides all these other factors, cohabiting can, to some extent, promote the spread of HIV and Aids because when couples live in, they tend to be careless about sex and in the event of them breaking up, they enlarge and widen their sex network, hence their chances of contracting the deadly virus.