Living Together or Marriage?
“It’s just bureaucracy! A paper doesn’t mean anything. Love is what counts. Living together is a more romantic relationship. You need to be more careful and considerate toward each other when you’re not legally linked together.” That’s how Jan and Anna reasoned when they began living together.
SO EVIDENTLY some couples feel that by living together without legal bonds they will be afraid of losing each other. Thus they will be more careful with each other and their relationship. On the surface, that may seem like good reasoning. But are such relationships usually more stable than legal marriages?
Living Together—Are There Disadvantages?
In the book Unmarried Cohabitation, researcher J. Trost, after presenting data assembled from a study of the subject, revealed that “the dissolution frequency among the unmarried cohabitants is about twice as high as among the married couples.”
Jan and Anna lived together for three years before they got married. How stable was that first relationship? “We found that a casual relationship only held open the back door to other loose relationships. When you are just a cohabitant, you are more readily available to someone else.”
Lars and Anette also lived together for three years before getting married. Says Lars: “When problems arose, we were more inclined to run away from each other than to sit down and resolve matters, as we try to do now as married persons.” Anette adds: “I don’t know how many times I got mad at Lars and told him I would take my things and leave. I never do that now.”
“My things,” Anette said. That reflects how unwed partners may view their belongings—divided into “my” things and “your” things. Some carefully keep receipts and engrave or write their names on the things they buy—just in case. Does that sound like the basis for a stable, enduring relationship?
And what happens if the time comes when the couple decides to split up? Dividing up belongings can be a real problem, resulting in arguments and great injustices. For instance, if the woman has taken care of the children and the household, she may run the risk of being left destitute because her partner earned the money and bought most of the things. There may be little she can do legally because they are unwed. So what happens to her when they separate?
Some couples say that they live together for a time just to see if they are compatible for marriage. They feel that their future marriage will be more stable as a result. Is that the case? For example, has the divorce rate decreased in countries where this practice has been common?
Take Sweden as an example. Experts there estimate that 99 percent of a current group of newlyweds lived together before getting married. If unmarried cohabitation results in more secure marriages, then you would expect the divorce rate in that country to be dropping. Yet, statistics show that in the 25 years between 1958 and 1983, while the annual number of marriages decreased from 50,785 to 36,210, the number of divorces increased from 8,657 to 20,618. So do the facts indicate that living together tends to result in more stable marriages?
How Others Are Affected
Then there is the effect that a couple’s living together without marriage can have on others. There are still many who consider it wrong and even immoral to live together that way. Therefore, parents or grandparents may feel unhappy, embarrassed, and worried when their children or grandchildren just live together. Contact between the generations may be threatened.
Recalls Anna: “I think my parents felt quite ashamed of me when I began to live with Jan. Up till that time, I had always enjoyed a good relationship with them. But then they felt embarrassed whenever our relatives asked about me. And they felt very uncomfortable around Jan. Before long, they stopped visiting us altogether. I think they suffered a lot.”
And what about the children born from such a relationship? When parents make and break relationships, it can lead to cases where several children without a common set of parents are brought together in the same home. This may leave the children feeling confused and insecure. A survey conducted by a TV reporter among 15-year-old schoolchildren showed that about one out of three of these youngsters did not live with both of their biological parents. In Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, the figure was as high as 43 percent. The reporter commented: “We now have a completely different society. Many children of the 1980’s have two homes . . . They spend one weekend with mom and the next with dad.”
In a survey of 5,500 ten-year-old children in Sweden, assistant professor Claes Sundelin found that one boy out of ten had serious psychological problems. He concluded that children are “affected by the increase in separations” and that they “invest themselves emotionally in their nearest grown-ups, and a breakup causes great disappointment.” A 12-year-old girl, whose parents separated, expressed what many children in that situation feel when she said: “When I grow up, I want to live well. I’ll get married and never get divorced.”
In Sweden the term “separation” is used about unwed as well as married couples. Since unmarried cohabitation is a more unstable relationship than marriage, this would mean that children born to unwed parents run a greater risk of ending up in a one-parent home. In either case, children suffer from such separation, and often, like that 12-year-old girl, they say that when they grow up they want a strong, lasting relationship—in marriage.
There are other far-reaching effects when couples live together without marriage. As such relationships are not registered, authorities cannot take effective account of them and apply laws to them. Some couples decide not to marry in order to avoid unfavorable taxation and the loss of certain pensions and other social benefits. This has its effect on how the tax burden is apportioned among people in general. Laws involving inheritance, wills, partitioning of property, and custody of children cannot be fully applied either. As one Danish lawyer stated: “Apart from the moral question, from a strictly legal viewpoint, paperless marriages are undesirable. It takes a lot more paper, that is, more legal documents and procedures, to resolve property and custody matters than with properly registered marriages.”
Aside from the moral or social implications, there is another even more important consideration.
The Scriptural View
The Scriptural view of this matter may be of little or no importance to many of those who live together without marriage. But to those who want to apply God’s commandments, it is vital.
According to the Bible, legal marriage is the only form of cohabitation between a man and a woman that is authorized by man’s Creator. The Bible shows that Jehovah God brought the first human pair together in a marriage. Why? One purpose was companionship. As the historical account in Genesis says: “It is not good for the man to continue by himself. I am going to make a helper for him, as a complement of him.”(Ge 2:18) Another purpose was reproduction. “Be fruitful and become many and fill the earth,” the couple was told. (Ge 1:27, 28) That this was not to be a trial arrangement is evident from Genesis 2:24, which says: “A man will leave his father and his mother and he must stick to his wife and they must become one flesh.”
Although, today, every man and woman is imperfect and many marriages end in divorce, the legalized marriage still constitutes the most secure and firmly established form of cohabitation between a man and a woman in society today. No other form of cohabitation offers the same degree of protection and security to all parties, including the children, that legalized marriage does.
That is the conclusion that Jan and Anna came to. After having lived with Jan for several years, Anna began to study the Bible and attend the meetings of Jehovah’s Witnesses. She soon wanted to conform to the Bible’s requirements regarding marriage. So one day she asked Jan to marry her. He had noticed how happy and satisfied she was every time she came home from a meeting. He realized how much it would mean to her, so he married her.
‘That religion might also have a beneficial effect on me,’ Jan thought. He decided to investigate for himself. Soon he, too, concluded that the Scriptural view on marriage is the best one. Jan and Anna are now dedicated witnesses of Jehovah, both serving as full-time ministers. How does marriage compare with living together? They answer: “Before getting married, we just lived together. But after getting married, we began to build a much closer, more loving, and more responsible relationship, one that includes a third party—our Creator, Jehovah God. For more than a decade now, we have enjoyed a happy marriage, and we are still enjoying it!”
However, others may take yet another line. They feel that marriage may be a good arrangement, but that marital fidelity is not necessary. They claim that an extramarital affair may even have a positive and strengthening effect on a marriage. Is that really the case?
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“When problems arose, we were more inclined to run away from each other than to sit down and resolve matters, as we try to do now as married persons”
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The legalized marriage still constitutes the most secure and firmly established form of cohabitation between a man and a woman in society today
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Children are affected emotionally when parents separate