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Benefits Of A Single Rent Check

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Giving Up Shacking Up Before Hitching Up Marriage used to be essential to a couple sharing a life together. Now, it is becoming increasingly common for couples to live together before marrying. Sharing a single rent check, shyness about making a life-long commitment, or just the popularity of cohabiting celebrity couples, such as Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, are all reasons moving in together before marriage is clearly more popular than ever. While generally viewed as the perfect opportunity for couples to ensure they are a good match before becoming “marriage-official,” cohabiting may actually increase relationship instability, negatively affects health, and even has negative impacts on children. The goal of cohabiting for most …show more content…

Expectations at this point in a relationship often differ, and as Linda Waite reports, even if one partner expects the relationship to be permanent, the other often does not (2000). With differing expectations, lack of communication understandably leads to misunderstandings and eventually arguments. The negative atmosphere fostered in a cohabitation relationship not only comes from lower levels of communication, but also confusion over roles in the relationship such as finances and household chores. Unlike a marriage relationship, cohabiting couples have no assurance that their partner will be around indefinitely. Because of this, these couples often carry out their tasks individually instead of dividing the work, resulting in two people getting in each other’s way and general disorder in the relationship. The instability and increased negative interaction caused by cohabitation both contribute to higher divorce rates among couples who cohabited before marrying. Macklin’s studies have shown that married couples who lived together before getting married disagree more often over finances, household duties, and even recreational activities. Not only this, but couples in this situation are typically less dependent on their spouses and a higher percentage of these couples seek marriage counseling than couples who did not live together before marriage (1978). The higher divorce rates among married couples who previously

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