Increasing in Cohabitationand Decrase Divorce Rates

Increasing in Cohabitation with and Decrease Divorce Rates
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Increasing in Cohabitation with and Decrease Divorce Rates
According to the U.S Census Statistics, almost half of the marriages in America end up in divorce (Amie, 2012). This is a very high rate of divorce, and different approaches to marriages need to be considered and can be appropriate in decreasing this marriage trend in American families. Cohabitation is one of such approaches that have proved to be successful in strengthening the American families. Cohabitation or "marriage in sin" as it was commonly known in the 1960s allows couples to have a "trial marriage" before they commit themselves into matrimonial bonds. According to the recent statistics, two-thirds of the American population is likely to cohabitate, and one-half of marriages emerge from those cohabitations.
There are dozens of research that state that most people who cohabitated before the marriage ended up in divorce. However, this is not the case in the current world, as Kuperberg (2014) suggests "Today 70 percent of women aged 30 to 34 have cohabited with a male partner, and two-thirds of new marriages take place between couples who have already lived together for an average of 21 months," (Kuberperg, 2014). This is troubling especially to the dozens of studies that were conducted between the 1970s and 2000s; they showed that people who cohabited were more likely to divorce than couples entered into marriages immediately after dating.
For the past two years, new evidence has emerged suggesting that the risk of divorce associated with premarital marriages is decreasing. Recent studies have found out that marriages formed since the mid-90s, cohabitation was not a risk for divorce. However, this has not been the case for a minority of women who are prone to divorce such as women who had a premarital birth, raised in a single or stepparent families, or had more sex partners. Otherwise, despite these few exceptions, cohabitating has proved to be more protective against risks of divorce than entering into directly from dating.
The ongoing researches on this topic continue to suggest that those who live together before marriage get more prepared and confident about marriage. This has been the reason why divorce rates are declining as days goes by. Today, dozens of studies on relationships and marriages point to cohabitation as a defacto "first union for young adults," (Renfro, 2016) Manning and Jessica notes that cohabitation "has become part of the pathway towards marriage" in a study that was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family (Renfro, 2016).
As cohabitation becomes the norm of marriages, traditional aspects of engagements are also shifting as a response to this trend. Traditionally, couples received household gifts during their wedding day, but this has changed. Today couples prefer "honeyfunds" as a wedding gift. Couples are more likely to expect cash as gifts on the wedding than against the previous decades where goats were the main gifts. This is because couples have lived together and have collected the necessary household things (Renfro, 2016).
Most people are questioning why this is happening. Some link this to religion....