There was an article on the Christian website RELEVANT
where this author, Bronwyn Lea,
basically talked about the three tough problems she has had since getting married.
And they're not the toughest problems. She's not worried about
getting divorced really quickly. She's not worried that there's some major problem between her husband and herself.
But she said there were a few small things, that were building up, that she wasn't expecting.
So, for example, she said one of the things is
trying to find some "alone time".
Because even when you're at home living with your spouse, it's tough to find time where you could just focus on yourself,
because the other person is always there.
She talked about finding time to spend with your friends.
Like she can't go out, you know, all the time during the week
to hang out with her girlfriends
because she feels weird leaving her husband at home. And I understand that.
And she also talked about
how you have to make all of these decisions as a couple, all the time.
Not crazy big decisions, but small ones that you have to make all the time, like,
Are we going to--? What are we going to have for dinner? Who's going to cook dinner?
Who's going to wash the dishes? How soon after dinner you're going to wash dishes?
And you gotta work that stuff out as a couple.
And she said,
when people asked her about what marriage is like,
she said it's a big adjustment.
And that's kind of a euphemism for what she was really feeling.
She loves her husband. Has no-- Doesn't want to not be married,
but she said trying to work through all those things was very difficult.
And you can kind of see where she's coming from.
But here's the problem with that:
there's a way to solve a lot of those problems
and she just totally glossed over it.
And the solution is:
live with your partner before you get married.
It seems like a pretty obvious solution if you just
spend some time with each other living together
before you take that, you know, official legal leap.
You gotta figure out what makes the other person tick, you figure out what their quirks are.
And you learn how to adjust and,
you know what? Worst case scenario,
you figure out that -- you know what? --
maybe this person isn't someone I'm ready to spend the rest of my life with.
And maybe jumping into marriage isn't the decision we want to make.
It's a lot easier to cohabitate and separate,
than it is to get married and then divorced.
This whole thing reminds me of this whole evangelical purity culture mentality
that you're ruining something special if you experience it too early.
And a lot of Christians like to say
that, you know, cohabitation will lead to divorce; it leads to unhappy marriages.
The statistics say people who live together don't fare as well
as couples who move in together when they're married.
But what a lot of those statistics don't tell you
is that, who tends to live together?
It's people who are younger
who may want to save money on rent by living together?
And it's often times people who don't have a lot of money.
And those-- The age factor, the money factor;
those are some of the reasons
people tend to get divorced anyway.
So, it's not the cohabitation that's the issue; is that when you're young, possibly inmature;
when you have a lot of money struggles - financial struggles -
yeah, you're more likely to get divorced.
It turns out,
when you take all those other issues, when you control for all those other factors,
people who live together before marriage
fare just as well as people who live together
after they get married.
And by the way, I'm not saying that marriage is easy. Every couple has their problems
and the ones we're talking about in this video right now,
these are not major problems.
But all I'm saying is if there's a way to work out some of these issues
before you get married, before they snowball into something that you can't control anymore,
why not even consider cohabitation as a possible solution?
And that's what Miss Lea didn't do in her article?
And the funny thing is she fully acknowledges, in the comments section on a separate article she wrote elsewhere,
that that's a possibility, but it's not one, you know, she would ever consider or endorse.
Why not?
Nothing.
There's just silence. She has no good reason for not really wanting it, except for the sort of fear-mongering that a lot of people do
that, you know, maybe they're afraid like, if you live together, you're gonna have sex before marriage
and then the world is going to explode, or something like that.
It's crazy.
Cohabitation isn't going to be for everybody,
but maybe it's something, you know, if it's good for you, if it's good for your partner,
then give it a shot.
On a personal note,
I did live with my wife about a year before we got married,
and I'm really, really glad we did,
because it gave us both the chance to know what we're both like living together, you know. She learned my quirks, I learned her quirks.
And I think that's a positive thing. When we finally did get married,
there have not been any big surprises so far. And I think that's the thing
that kind of shook up the Christian author of that article; that there were all these surprises.
I haven't experienced that.
When people ask me, you know, what's married life like,
I've been able to answer them:
"It's pretty much the same as pre married life was",
and I mean that in the best possible way.
Again, cohabitation worked for us. It may not work for everybody.
But why not at least consider it, because it gives you a chance to kind of give your marriage a trial run
and you can, you know, if things go great, you know exactly what you're going into.
And if it doesn't work out,
you can kind of put the brakes
on this relationship before it gets even more serious.
My name is Hemant Mehta and I write at FriendlyAtheist.com
Please, leave a comment below, and we will check them out.