Why cohabitation before marriage kills love
There is no such thing as test-driving life
Puzzle Box People
One of the problems with modern psychology is that it has made us believe that a human being is like a puzzle box that, with familiarity and effort, can be “decoded” by the motivated person. I believe this flawed psychological hypothesis is behind the idea that cohabitation before marriage is a good idea. People believe that by spending enough time with the person they’re “dating” they may decode the other person completely and then be “fully informed” before signing the serious contract of marriage with them. But human beings are not puzzle boxes; they do not have an innate and unchanging set of switches and levers. The evidence for this is that human beings influence and are influenced by others. We mimic, mould and react to each other and to different situations in complex ways. As a result, it is impossible to ever be “fully informed” about someone before marrying them.
Hollywood has told us that the natural next step for a couple after they have fallen in love with each other is to “move in together” and that they must do this for a few years before even entertaining the idea of marriage. This little formula, however, has insidiously murdered marital love. Couples that cohabitate before marriage are more likely to divorce. It makes sense; the entire marriage would be coloured by the fact that the other person needed years of “test-driving” to figure out if you’re the “right person”.
Bad Advice from Old People
Old age used to be a proxy for wisdom, but today’s elders are disappointing in their paucity of wisdom and their overabundance of materialism and selfishness. I personally have been told by many older women that it is foolish to get married early in life and even more foolish to marry a man I have only known for a few weeks without even having lived with him. I did not marry “young” by any historical standards as I was 27 years old. According to the statistics reporting divorce rates, the opposite of their advice is actually true. It is better to get married young, and it is good to marry sooner rather than later in a courtship. But why? There is a very easy to understand mechanism behind this.