Oh, and my marriage became void and utterly meaningless on the day same-sex marriage became valid. But we figured, hey, after 23 years we’re going to keep living together anyway, why bother with the paperwork?

(Yes, I am happily living in sin as I type this. With hopeful plans for an eventual wedding, but not so much an actual legal marriage.)

Sorry, should be divorced once. Otherwise it doesn’t make much sense…

I’ve often wondered with the “half” statistic if TPTB factored in multiple marriages and divorces. I mean, some people may rush into marriages and divorces serially, and others get divorced twice, some don’t get divorced if married and others never get married, etc.

>After all, presumably people in these desperate circumstances continue to choose to live in sin, and continue to get married and divorced, just as always. Sure; but to the extent that less desperate people are also now living in sin, they now dilute the effects of their more desperate neighbors.

Nobody.really, that sounds at least plausible. and likely for a lot of people.

The other thing that comes to mind is that there seems to be a 5-10 year shelf-life to monogamous relationships/partnerships (the infamous “7 year itch”), which IMO probably correlates to changes in life goals, change in maturity levels, stresses of parenthood or in elder care, financial stresses, that can make a couple either 1) reevaluate and reform their relationship to fit who they are NOW, or 2) drift apart and end the relationship. So if people live together X amount of years and don’t deal with typical relationship problems, and then get married, and then divorced, it can look like the “living together” part of the relationship was the problem, when it was other factors, especially when the couple has lived together longer than they’d been married.

Of course that then brings up the reasons people get married. IF it’s to placate family, it may be doomed. If it’s for relatively objective reasons and the rest of the relationship is comfortable and secure, then it will likely work out. I moved in with my fiance 6 months before the wedding because he needed to start moving his life, essentially, from one state to another. One of my best friends got married so that her fiance could take over her medical care when she was terminally ill - in one afternoon at the courthouse, he went from being kicked out of the hospital after visiting hours were over to being able to be there 24-7. Another friend has been married a year but partnered to her husband for 20 years. They alternately put each other through school, shared ownership of a house, etc. and were missing out on the combined tax benefits, and all the other benefits that come with federally and state recognized marriage.

>Wait, wasn’t same-sex marriage supposed to destroy marriage rates?

Heh. Yeah, right. My husband and I have a running joke that so isn’t funny. “So, hon, are you feeling like you want to leave me and marry Chris? Is our marriage threatened yet? Nope? yeah, me neither.”

I always thought that there were any number of possible explanations for why “living in sin” might correlate with divorce but not cause divorce. First, there might simply be trends. I believe that newer marriages are more prone to break up than older ones. That is, the most risky year for a marriage (or a baby, or a computer, or a car, or …) is the first; many terminal defects become apparent early. Plus, marriages among young people are more prone to break up, if for no other reason than the longer you have to live in your marriage, the more years there are in which to get divorced. Given these dynamics, I would expect to find a correlation between divorce and ANYTHING that a younger cohort is more prone to do than an older cohort: living together before marriage, having sex, going to school, listening to contemporary music, chatting on the internet, failing to start an IRA account, avoiding two-tone shoes, etc. Now that the trend of living together before marriage is becoming a norm – that is, now that it is no longer a marker of a younger cohort – it no longer correlates with the problems of youth.

Then there is the question of WHY people would choose to live together. There seems to be an assumption that people are lured by a demand for housing that includes sex, Sex, SEX! But there’s also the issue of supply. I’m more likely to move in with my significant other if I have no other choice of housing – if my parents are abusive or homeless or absent, for example, and I lack any other social network. But I understand that people who come from these circumstances are more prone to divorce REGARDLESS of whether they live with a significant other before marriage. Again, we’d see correlation without causation. But why would we see a change in the data now? After all, presumably people in these desperate circumstances continue to choose to live in sin, and continue to get married and divorced, just as always. Sure; but to the extent that less desperate people are also now living in sin, they now dilute the effects of their more desperate neighbors.