The deceptive fable of "test drive" Marriage
Is Cohabitation the Modern Version of Marriage?
Excerpt:
For many American young people, cohabitation is considered to be a low-cost, no-hassle alternative to marriage, a “test-drive” in some cases, or more often merely an exciting fling of no great consequence. Sadly, they have bought into the seductive cohabitation mythology. It is commonplace to hear them parroting the following specious arguments: (1) Living together is a “trial marriage” to “test the waters” to see if the couple is “compatible.” (2) Young couples cannot afford to get married; they need to wait until they are financially secure and their careers are well-established. (3) A girl should be able to have the big, expensive wedding that fulfills her childhood dreams. And on and on the deceptive fable gets spun.
Comment: No God-fearing Christian with any semblance of Bible knowledge would be drawn into this error!
I have a link or the PDF saved somewhere, but there is more damage to cohabitational couples than simply a higher chance of divorce. The article I have saved had a lot of statistics to prove many things, a couple were: married couples make significantly more, more happy, much lower spousal/child abuse. The abuse one I think is huge, if you think about it. I believe every statistic showed that most arguments for cohabitational couples are proven wrong.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Focus on the family sources I read, cohabitation triples the rate of abuse and increases the risk of divorce by 50%. When the divorce rate is already 40% or so, that's huge.
ReplyDeleteWhen my brother told me he was going to cohabit, I warned him of exactly this correlation. Thankfully, he and his now wife are still on the right side of both statistics, as far as I know.