Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Cohabitation increases risk of divorce, new study says

Couples who live together before they marry are significantly more likely to end up divorced, according to a new report.

The study, produced by the Jubilee Centre in the UK, found that couples who have lived with each other were 15 per cent more likely to get divorced than those who didn’t first live together.  

And couples who have previously lived with a different partner before getting married are around 45 per cent more likely to divorce.

According to the report, more couples are cohabiting than ever before, with the average time spent living together before tying the knot doubling to three-and-a-half years in the past four decades.

Separation rates for cohabitees and married couples are significantly different for couples with children, according to the report.  

Cohabiting couples are six times more likely to split by the time their first child is five compared with married couples. 

By the time the child is 16, the separation rate for cohabiting couples is still four times as high as for couples who marry.

The report said that living together had become, “a more fragile state of relationship than ever before.”

The study's authors Dr John Hayward and Dr Guy Brandon said, “Despite the popularity of cohabitation and its relationship to marriage, it is also the case that marriages that start with a period of prior cohabitation are significantly more prone to divorce than those that do not.  Where there has been a previous cohabitation with a separate person by one of both partners, the likelihood of divorce soars.”

According to the report, the average age of first cohabitation in the UK today is about the same as the average age of first marriage thirty years ago: at 23 years for women and 25 years for men.  

More couples are cohabiting for longer, with the median duration rising from 2½ years to 3½ years between the 1980s and early 2000s.

Mean lengths of cohabitation have roughly doubled over 40 years.  

However, less than 1-in-4 couples cohabit for more than 6½ years and even fewer couples now cohabit for very long periods of time before they separate or get married.

The number of couples who have gotten married without first cohabiting has gone from nearly 100 per cent in 1970 to 15 per cent.

The data was based on 14,103 households and 22,265 adults.

The research follows on from the think tank’s 2010 publication Cohabitation in the 21st Century, which showed the cost of family breakdown is £41.7billion.  

This is equivalent to £1,350 for every taxpayer each year.

It claimed these costs will, “rise significantly” over the next 25 years, with its analysis based on almost 30,000 family cases drawn from a nationwide survey.