Is cohabitation the new courtship?

A new acronym entered the language this summer: WAGS. These were, famously, the “wives and girlfriends” of England’s footballers. Awash with vintage champagne and handbags costing £10,000, they are the role models for a lot of the young girls round our way, in East Kent.

But it’s significant, all the same, that the WAGS have not been dubbed “footballers’ partners”, which would be the Politically Correct term. That is because, for most young women who follow the celeb magazines, in their hearts they want to think of these glamourous houris as “wives” and “girlfriends”. At some level, they recognise a difference between the two categories.

Cohabitation is the norm among young people in Britain today. “Living in sin” is a concept that most older people can remember: but it seems so archaic it might as well come from the Boer War. Most younger people wouldn’t understand what you were saying if you used the expression.

And a surprising number of older people, who may or may not “live in sin” themselves, approve of the contemporary, more relaxed rules on co-habitation. Cohabitation might, people think, prevent unhappy marriages where couples who know nothing about one another’s domestic habits too hastily tie the knot.

Many feminists of my generation – the 1960s baby-boomers – think the habit of co-habitation a much more rational approach to relationships. Some even remember that once you virtually had to get married if you wanted a regular sex-life. How repressive!

Cohabitation seems a sensible preparation for wedlock. As my Aunty Dorothy used to say – a bit grimly, I thought: “If you want to know me, come and live with me!”

But it seems now that, far from being a natural prelude to marriage or permanent commitment, cohabitation can be an inoculation against it. Research by Cornell University and published in the academic American journal Demography is now showing that cohabitation is unstable: half of all cohabitees last less than a year; the average length of cohabitation is just two years, and more than half of all cohabitees split up within five years of the birth of a child.

Anecdotally, cohabitation seems like a preparation for marriage. Among the mothers of the twenty and thirty-somethings, there is a general expectation that the co-habitation phase should be about two years: and then comes the time to procede onto engagement and, finally, a wedding. And anecdotally, you see that happening. The cohabitation is now the “courtship” period: the engagement the move towards commitment, and the wedding the (often lavish) commitment.

It may occur anecdotally, but the studies indicate – and the British research shows similar trends to the American findings – that it is more like a trial period which can take the fizz out of the relationship. Cornell University boffins call it “an intense form of dating”.

“If you want to know me – come and live with me,” is not, after all, much of a recipe for romance. Living with someone has a high quotient of the humdrum, the banalities of domesticity, and the plain irritating.

These can be sustained under the glow of passionate love, deep attachment and the rush of novelty that comes with being newly married. I seem to remember it seemed frightfully exciting and grown-up to be addressed as “Mrs”, for the first time.

But cohabitation itself is often too casually entered into to bear the weight of tolerance required to sustain togetherness.

If the commitment of a vow isn’t there, the vexations of conjugality will surely be felt all the more swiftly.

Some observers might think it all to the good, if cohabitation is more of a litmus test than an automatic road to the altar, or permanency.

I have encountered parents who are relieved that their grown offspring are cohabiting - rather than married - to someone they regard as unsuitable. “Let her get him out of her system by living with him.”

A mother told me the other day about her son having “shacked up” with a “totally unsuitable partner” for nearly ten years. The girl was completely wrong for him (though mothers of sons may not always be the most disinterested of judges).

But fortune smiled. One day he knocked on his parents’ door again. He had walked out on the unsuitable young woman. He had “got her out of his system”. Subsequently, he married a very nice young person and is now the father of a happy family.

Here, cohabitation was the test that failed the relationship. And perhaps for the best. But I couldn’t help thinking, all the same, of the abandoned young woman. She had spent a decade with someone she presumably loved – and was found wanting. True, a marriage could have ended in divorce anyhow, but I’m not sure if that is always a comfort in these circumstances.

The fact that social researchers are now differentiating cohabitation from marriage – as two separate kinds of arrangements – rather as the double definition of WAGS does, may, in the end, be a boost for marriage.

If cohabitation is seen as a try-out relationship lacking real commitment and frequently associated with failure, that elevates marriage, by definition, to the position of the gold standard. Cohabitation is the imitation: marriage is the real thing.

It is not that, in a tolerant society, cohabitation should be stigmatised. Individuals must make their own choices, and a valid marriage must be voluntary. Moreover, for some romantics and old Bohemians, togetherness without that piece of paper, will seem to represent both true love and true freedom.

But it is still better, overall, that there should be a general aspiration towards marriage. Study after study has shown that it is more stable, more beneficial for children and it teaches individuals more about commitment. (Or, as the nuns at our convent school used to say: “you can develop the virtues of patience and endurance, girls, just as much by being a wife as by being a saint!” Indeed.)

Many of the young women I’ve encountered who follow the fortunes of the WAGS are cohabiting with the man they refer to as “my other half”. Many of them would love to be married – to proceed from girlfriend to wife – but they’ve been led to believe that cohabitation amounts to the same thing; and anyway, a wedding is too expensive if you can’t do it like the Beckhams.

But instead of seeking to conflate marriage and cohabitation, as the Blair administration seems so keen to do, it would be fairer and kinder to reflect the findings of the research work and explain that really, they are often quite different. ENDS.

Daily Telegraph: 12 July 2006.