A tweet by Brad Wilcox:
New "research by Stanley & Rhoades [indicates...] men & women who cohabited w 2+ partners prior to marriage were 60% more likely to end up seeing their marriage end in divorce or separation"
Well, there you have it guys. Have you shacked up with at least two women, including your current girlfriend/fiancee? Has she? If either of you have, you have another reason to avoid marrying. Your marriage would be doomed!
Sure, the tweet and the report behind it are intended to try to get people who haven't shacked up yet not to do so. But we can still apply it to people who have, who should use the information to avert disaster.
DO NOT MARRY!
Wilcox had a
whole article about this.
The Swift-and-Alwyn saga follows a script that the majority of today’s adults, including many Christians, follow: meet, date, fall in love, and sort of drift into living together as the “next step” in your romance — without clear intentions to marry.
So what? What's inherently wrong with relationships running their course and ending or changing? Who says every relationship should lead to marriage and the marriage should never end?
In fact, an estimated 70% of couples today will cohabit before tying the knot. Pew Research found that 58% of white evangelicals believe that cohabitation is “morally acceptable” if a couple plans to marry. A 2012 General Social Survey found that 41% of Christians believe living together is acceptable even without marriage plans.
Yes! So all it takes is this, plus a few other common red flags, and there are NO acceptable prospects for marriage, if someone wants a lasting, happy marriage. So don't order your life and spend your time and energy around trying to find a prospect. Accept the freedom that comes with realizing you're better off as a free man, who lives his life accordingly.
The popularity of cohabitation flows partly from the fact that many young people believe the myth that living together before marriage is not only acceptable but beneficial for their eventual marriage — even though research continues to link cohabitation to lower quality and less stable unions.
I've explained this thoroughly already.
The research tells us, for instance, that most cohabitating couples today end up like Swift and Alwyn, not even making it to the altar.
Who says they are supposed to make it to the altar? Let's say those two married instead of shacking up, or, like Dennis Prager would tell them, married because they already were shacking up. They'd likely be divorcing now instead of just breaking up. How would that be better???
This new research by Stanley and Rhoades also provides additional evidence that accumulating cohabiting partners prior to marriage is a risky proposition.
So don't marry!
Don't let these claims that "If you do X, Y, and Z, you'll have a happy, lasting marriage" fool you. There are people out there who never shacked up with anyone and are divorced or in miserable marriages. A lot of people! You likely know people like that. You might BE someone like that. I am someone like that!
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