Living Together Before Marriage: What the Research Actually Found

The Question Has Flipped Since Your Parents Asked It

In 1970, living together before marriage was rare and stigmatized — NSFG data shows just 11% of women marrying for the first time that year had cohabited with their husband. By 1980 it was 34%; by 2000, 60%; by 2011, 70%. Cohabitation went from an unconventional choice to the default path into marriage within a single generation.

That shift matters for reading the research, because the population of cohabiters changed completely. When 11% of couples lived together first, they were a self-selected group — less religious, more tolerant of nontraditional arrangements — and their higher divorce rates could plausibly reflect who they were rather than what they did. When 70% cohabit, that selection story weakens, and sociologists expected the cohabitation-divorce link to disappear. Several studies of recent marriages reported exactly that. Then Rosenfeld and Roesler reopened the question.

What the Stanford Study Found

Michael Rosenfeld (also behind the How Couples Meet and Stay Together project) and Katharina Roesler harmonized every NSFG wave from 1988 onward into a single event-history dataset: 24,888 women in first marriages, 216,455 couple-years of observation. Their core findings, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2019:

• The overall association persists. Couples who cohabited before marriage had 1.37 times the raw odds of divorce, or 1.31 times with controls — and the adjusted odds ratio stayed between 1.2 and 1.4 across every decade of marriage cohorts. No meaningful decline over time.
• But the first year reverses it. In the first year of marriage, couples who had not cohabited broke up at 4.1%, versus 3.9% for those who had. Cohabiters entered marriage already knowing how to share a home, and it showed — briefly.
• The advantage expires. After year one, non-cohabiters "caught up" on practical experience, and from that point the cohabiters' divorce hazard ran higher for the remainder of the observation window.

The Finding That Should Get More Attention: Who You Lived With Before

The study's most practically useful result is one that rarely makes the summaries. When the authors separated cohabitation with the eventual spouse from cohabitation with other partners before marriage, the picture changed:

• Living with the person you went on to marry: 1.19× the odds of divorce in any given year.
• Having lived with one other partner before marrying: 3.25×.
• Having lived with two or more other partners: 4.66×.

A substantial share of the headline "cohabitation effect" was carried by prior cohabitations with other people, not by living with your future spouse. Whether that reflects selection (people with serial cohabitation histories differ in ways that also predict divorce), experience (a track record of dissolved live-in relationships lowers the barrier to dissolving another), or something else, the study can't fully separate. But it reframes the practical question from "should we live together?" toward the harder one of what someone's relationship history actually looks like — the kind of information the exclusivity and emotional availability conversations are designed to surface.

The Debate Is Real

This is contested science, and the honest summary includes the pushback. Wendy Manning, Pamela Smock, and Arielle Kuperberg published a formal comment in the same journal in 2021 arguing that the association has weakened in recent marriage cohorts and that Rosenfeld and Roesler's modeling choices — particularly using calendar year rather than marriage cohort as the time axis — drive their result. Rosenfeld replied defending the approach. Both camps agree on the raw facts (cohabitation is near-universal; the raw association exists); they disagree about whether it's fading and what it means.

What a Dating Person Can Actually Take From This

The research doesn't hand down a verdict on moving in together. What it supports is more specific. First, the timing of the decision matters less than its deliberateness — a body of work by Scott Stanley and colleagues on "sliding versus deciding" finds that couples who drift into cohabitation through convenience fare worse than those who choose it as a step toward commitment, which is consistent with the pattern here. Second, a partner's history of prior live-in relationships is a more informative data point than whether the two of you share an address before the wedding. And third, the first-year advantage cohabiters showed is a reminder that knowing someone well before committing is protective — whatever form that knowing takes.

Sources:

• Rosenfeld, M. J., & Roesler, K. (2019). Cohabitation Experience and Cohabitation's Association With Marital Dissolution. Journal of Marriage and Family, 81(1), 42–58.
• Manning, W. D., Smock, P. J., & Kuperberg, A. (2021). Cohabitation and Marital Dissolution: A Comment on Rosenfeld and Roesler (2019). Journal of Marriage and Family, 83(1).