There’s A Reason Moving In Before Marriage Makes Divorce More Likely, But Barstool Can’t Figure It Out BY: ELLE PURNEL for The Federalist
To approach marriage as a means to the end of loving ourselves is to make the marriage as futile of a pursuit as ‘self-love’ is.
First comes love, then comes an indeterminate period of conveniently living together to decide whether your partner’s dishwasher-loading habits are a dealbreaker, then comes marriage.
Today a lot of young daters assume moving in together is a prerequisite for matrimonial success. But it actually hikes up a couple’s proclivity toward divorce compared to spouses who wed without first cohabitating — a statistic that shocked hosts Jordyn Woodruff and Alex Bennett of Barstool Sports’ “Mean Girl” podcast in Wednesday’s episode.
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“Couples who live together before marrying have nearly an 80 percent higher divorce rate than those who do not,” Bennett noted incredulously.
“Which is crazy because you’d think you’d be the opposite,” Woodruff responded. “I lived with my boyfriend of five years and we broke up because we knew we weren’t compatible because we lived together.”
“Because living together is the way you find out,” Bennett added, even though, as she noted, she and her husband didn’t move in together before marriage (mostly as a matter of coincidence).
“Of course the natural step would have been to move in together,” she continued. “You save on rent, I get to know how you do the dishes, we get to do all of these things beforehand, before we get married.”
For most young couples, that’s the prevailing mindset. Producer Alanna Vizzoni piped in to note that she didn’t know anyone who hadn’t lived together before tying the knot: “I feel like that’s just kind of how people do it now.”
Instead of leading to better marital outcomes, however, the cohabitation trend is making marriages less successful. Why?
