Cohabitation, a lousy choice

                                                                                                                   Vol. XXIV, No. 7, August 2011

Research tells us other surprising things. In defending single motherhood, some feminists have suggested that the traditional family is itself a breeder of violence against women and other "dysfunctional" behaviors. "One out of every two marriages," claims Libby Bortz, a psychiatric social worker and community activist in Denver, "contains one episode – at least one episode – of physical violence," and "one of every three or four ... female children under the age of eighteen experiences sexual abuse." The truth is the opposite: What increases the risk of domestic violence against women, plus the risk of physical and sexual abuse of children, is living together outside of marriage. Cohabitation also increases the likelihood both of depression and, specifically, of sexual unhappiness: Cohabiting couples show lower levels of sexual satisfaction than do married couples.

...

To sum up: Widespread cohabitation delivers, in practice, nothing of what it promises in theory. To the contrary, it undermines lasting attachments, mutual obligations, successful child-rearing, and sexual fidelity. It undermines those precious things themselves, and it undermines our belief in them. What it offers instead is a kind of institutionalized adolescence: a dream of free love freely bestowed, a love relying solely on the springs of mutual emotion and independent of the legal and other constraints imposed by state and society and their surrogates in the form of traditional family arrangements.

[William Bennett, The Broken Hearth (Waterbrook Press, 2001) p. 78, 81]