Source: madamenoire.com

From yourtango.com

By Ph.D. Sherrie Campbell

If you are considering moving in with your partner before marriage, there are many things to consider. On the positive side, if you move in with that person, you will really get to see who you are with and all of their habits before you marry him/her. This way, when or if you get to marriage, there will be no disappointments or surprises.

In living together, you will have learned how your partner operates around money, chores and daily responsibilities. Still, sometimes living together delays the option of marriage even longer because really, what is the rush? You are living together, so you are having the experience of being married, and so it can take longer to get to that marital destination. This usually creates conflict for at least one partner.

So, before you decide to live together, check out these 6 words of caution at yourtango.com

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Today about 60 percent of couples live together before they get married for the first time, as the idea that you better make sure you can actually stand the person you plan to spend the rest of your life with has caught on like wildfire. For the remaining 40 percent, religious reasons or fear that living together before marriage will somehow doom their union causes them to maintain separate quarters. But a new study shows that couples who live together before walking down the aisle have no greater chance of their marriage lasting 15 years than couples who don’t.

Wendy Manning, co-director of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, isn’t shocked. “It’s becoming so common, it’s not surprising it no longer negatively affects marital stability,” she said.

Overall, from interviews of men and women ages 15 to 44 during the years 2006 to 2010, the researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly half of first marriages break up within 20 years. There was about a 60 percent likelihood a marriage would survive 15 years if the couple either hadn’t lived together before the wedding or were engaged while they shacked up. But if no firm marriage commitment was made before the move in, the likelihood the marriage would last 15 years fell to 53 percent.

Casey Copen, lead author of the study, said lax attitudes about commitment, lower education levels, or family histories that made these couples more pessimistic about marriage could explain the drop in marriage survival. That basically adds up to a lack of communication about expectations and goals for the relationship and family unit.

The CDC also found a few other interesting statistics on marriage and relationships in general:

• The percentage of young women currently living with a male partner grew from 3 percent in 1982 to 11 percent recently.
• Women and men with bachelor’s degrees were more likely to delay marriage but also more likely to eventually get married and stay married for at least 20 years.
• At 20 years, nearly 70 percent of Asian women were still in their first marriage, compared to 54 percent of white women, 53 percent of Hispanic women and 37 percent of black women.
• For men, 62 percent of Hispanics were still in their first marriage at 20 years, compared to 54 percent of whites and 53 percent of blacks. (There were no statistics for Asian men.)

Where do you stand on cohabitation before marriage? Do you think it’s a good or a bad idea?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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Call it a hybrid of living together and serious dating, a new trend is coming into play: “Stayover Relationships,” defined and identified in a study by the University of Missouri as “Spending three or more nights together each week while maintaining the option of going to their own homes.”

Guess that means double toothbrushes, double deodorants, pitching in a little on the groceries since you eat at your boo’s place two, maybe three times a week?

These “stayover relationships” aren’t necessarily blooming into full-fledged marriages, though.  Tyler Jamison, the researcher for the Department of Human Development at the university, says that while amongst college-educated people the whole “shacking up” thing has become less taboo, “many young adults want to avoid the potential negative social consequences of cohabitation.”

Is it just me, but does “avoiding negative social consequences” the same as…I don’t know… “taboo?”

I have to sort of laugh to myself, because about 10 months before we got married, my husband (then boyfriend) moved in, but maintained a P.O. Box so his parents and mine didn’t know we shared a pre-marital bed.  We did get married, and will celebrate our tenth anniversary next April.

No one knows yet what impact, if any, this new trend will have on the already abysmal U.S. marriage rates.  Perhaps it’s more of the same.  However, other studies have tracked that college-aged adults are marrying–and staying married–in higher numbers.

So how to interpret the data?  Marriage up, non-married monogamous relationships go…sideways?

Christelyn D. Karazin is the co-author of Swirling: How to Date, Mate and Relate Mixing Race Culture and Creed (to be released April 2012), and runs a blog, www.beyondblackwhite.com, dedicated to women of color who are interested and or involved in interracial and intercultural relationships. She is also the founder and organizer of “No Wedding, No Womb,” an initiative to find solutions to the 72 percent out-of-wedlock rate in the black community.

Whether you’re starting out on your journey of marital bliss or just shacking up, living with another person can be quite a challenge.  It takes some compromise and sacrifice and sometimes even a few hurt feelings before everything settles.

To avoid all of that, try out the following tips to living together in peace: