Study: Living Together Before Your Wedding Will Not Doom Your Marriage

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – In the past there had been chatter that living together before getting married puts couples at a greater risk for getting a divorce, but now a study suggests that may not be the case at all.

Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina Arielle Kuperberg found that there is no correlation between living together before marriage and divorce. The real indicator of what leads to divorce may be the age at which couples choose to move in together.

Kuperberg explained that couples who cohabitate before marriage tend to be younger, and because marrying at a young age increases the likelihood of a divorce, previous research suggested that living together did as well.  However, according to Kuperberg, that is not true and once you control the age variable, the correlations between living together and divorce is vanishes.

Kuperberg came to the conclusion after studying data on thousands of married women in the United States from the National Survey of Family Growth from the years 1995, 2002 and 2006 to 2010.

Her conclusion was then published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Take note that the study does not determine whether or not living together before marriage will lead to better marriages, it just says that it probably won't make them worse.