This is an interview with Glenn T. Stanton, author of The Ring Makes All the Difference. I encourage anyone already living with someone outside of marriage or considering the idea to read this book. It’s not a book full of pointing fingers or judgments; it’s a resourceful collection of honest facts that will hopefully guide each of you to make the best decision.
Q&A with Glenn T. Stanton
1. What does your book, The Ring Makes All the Difference, set out to do for the reader?
To tell the very important, but little known story of what the social sciences are telling about the impact of living together before marriage. It looks at a person’s current overall well-being as well as the future prospects of a happy, healthy, enduring marriage.
Unmarried cohabitation is most of the Western world’s fastest growing family and domestic form, so this is an important question to answer: “Is cohabitation likely to improve our overall happiness and well-being?” The book explains the “why” and “how” behind this question—and all from the leading science published over the last 30 years.
2. Who is the target audience for your book?
I really had two important groups in mind as I wrote the book. First were individuals who either are or are considering cohabitation. I want to help them determine whether this is a wise choice for them. But I also wrote it for professionals who deal with couples. Those are pastors and counselors.
It is a very informed, but approachable, practical book.
3. Coming from a large family-oriented organization, many would expect that you would say cohabitation isn’t the way to go to have the best marriage relationship. Why do you think this goes beyond what Focus on the Family’s message is to what secular research says?
Primarily because, as the book carefully illustrates, the case against cohabitation is not being made today by preachers and traditionalist grandmothers, but by cold, calculating science. Cohabitation is certainly a moral issue, but as I explain, it is because science tells us in a hundred different important ways that it diminishes our well-being in every important way. With more than 60 percent of all marriages being preceded by some type of cohabitation, this is a story that must be told…and listened to.
4. A recent New York Times article explained the number of Americans who have children and live together without marrying has increased twelvefold since 1970 and that children now are more likely to have unmarried parents than divorced ones. What kind of impact does this have on children and parents?
This is indeed very true. And the impact is tremendous and largely negative. First, children living with unmarried, cohabiting parents are more than three times more likely to live in poverty compared to their peers with married parents. In fact, a child living with cohabiting parents is more likely to look more like a child living with a single parent than with married parents. The marriage of mom and dad matters in profound, practical ways.
Children living with cohabiting parents, especially mom and her boyfriend, are dramatically more likely to suffer domestic abuse, 11 times more likely compared to a child living with his or her own married parents.
Children in cohabiting homes are more likely to have serious problems in a whole host of academic and behavioral situations than children with married parents.
Simply put, there is not one important measure in which cohabitation increases the well-being of children, but plenty of very serious ways in which it harms it.
5. What is the biggest thing that most cohabitating couples don’t realize about the consequences and negative impact of their decision to live together unmarried?
First that cohabitation will not help them avoid divorce, but ironically, increase their likelihood of divorce like few other things can. There is no real debate about this among researchers. The debate is on why. Research shows that cohabiting premaritally can boost one’s risk of divorce from 50 to 80 percent, with a 65 percent increase being the general average.
What is more, cohabitation teaches unhealthy relational behaviors that harm the present relationship as well as future marriage. Men who cohabit tend to be less likely committed to their relationship and less likely to be committed to their marriage if they do marry. This was not seen in women at all, which means that cohabitation is more harmful to women in terms of the kinds of relationships it leaves them with.
6. Many people believe that if you live together before you get married you’ll find out if the marriage is going to last and you can avoid divorce. What are your thoughts?
Scholars have found no support whatsoever for this very popular idea. In fact, seldom has there been something so widely believed by so many, but lacking any support for it. That is a big story in this book. The problem is that you should try out a new car or a laptop computer. But your beloved is not a consumer product. Trying someone out like that is saying, “I’m not really sure about you. Let me give you a spin and see what I think.” That is a very wrong-headed approach to the most meaningful relationship you will ever have. This is one of the reasons why cohabiting relationships don’t lead to happier, better relationships. It qualifies one’s commitment and devotion. And it also makes it more about you than your loved one.
7. Is it true that many marriages now begin as cohabitation? Is this as much of an issue for those who have been raised in a Christian home or are professing Christians?
Not many, most! Over 60 percent of marriages today are preceded by some form of cohabitation. But people with serious religious convictions are shown to cohabit at much lower numbers than those who are not religious. But far too many of our Christian young people cohabit and they need to know they are harming their present and future relationships in serious ways. The real reasons NOT to cohabit are far more than because they violate traditional values. It violates human realities.
8. What do you think the answer is to the issue of cohabitation and what practical advice does your book give on this?
People need to understand that this idea of “It doesn’t really matter what kinds of relationships people enter as long as they really love each other” is a warm idea, but it is simply not true. The answer to cohabitation is helping young people and older people understand they are acting against their own well-being by deciding to move in together. And this applies to all of us no matter how pure our love might be.
I received this book in exchange for my honest review.
