Living together first is 'not a marriage killer' - but youth is

Even as it has become the norm in Western countries for couples to live together before they get married, some sociologists still support the notion that people who cohabitate before marriage are more likely to divorce.

But now new research suggests the real factor that raises the risk of divorce. According to a paper by Arielle Kuperberg in the April issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family, it is not premarital cohabitation that predicts divorce. It is age.

It has long been known that there is a correlation between age at first marriage and divorce - the younger you get married the first time, up until your mid-20s, the more likely your marriage is to break up.

Kuperberg, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, looked at data from the National Survey of Family Growth from 1996-2010 and found that the same goes for cohabitators.

If you move in together in your teens or early 20s, then you are more at risk for divorce; the reason that couples who move in together young break up "is the same reason age of marriage is a predictor of divorce: people aren't prepared for those roles", Kuperberg says.

So why did the idea that cohabitation leads to divorce persist for so long? Part of the problem was that no one had run the numbers using age; they merely compared people who cohabitated with people who married without living together first.

Some sociologists now consider marriage to have become a "capstone". Many people in Western societies today marry once they are done with their education and are financially solvent, whereas in the 1950s and 1960s, marriage was a "cornerstone", which means that people got married before they had accomplished their goals and used that marriage as a solid foundation to go for those goals.