With the exception of bohemian free spirits, and such special cases where one party to the relationship was unable to obtain a divorce, these alliances were typically of short duration; the partners usually separated or married before very much time had elapsed.
(None of these remarks applies to common-law-marriage, which should be excluded from the category of non-marital cohabitation. A common-law marriage is simply a marriage without a marriage ceremony, and is so regarded in most jurisdictions. While arrangements of this sort are more or less acceptable in various social strata, they remain basically marital in nature.)
Both attitudes and practices in regard to non-marital cohabitation have changed so thoroughly that one hardly knows where to begin in enumerating them. College students share living quarters quite openly; a decade ago it was not impossible to be expelled from a majority of American colleges for having sexual relations. (This is not to say that students were much inclined to be virginal ten years ago, but that they had to be discreet; what was then called “discretion” is now called “hypocrisy.”)
For some couples, cohabitation is an end in itself. It is either considered a permanent situation, or permanence itself is rejected as a concept. “I don’t like to think in terms of a future,” one young man put it. “I think in terms of an extended present.” For other couples, a majority, cohabitation is regarded as a preliminary stage designed ultimately to resolve itself in a presumably monogamous marriage. Its role seems closer to that of engagement than anything else. Like an engagement, a cohabitational arrangement can be terminated before marriage with no stigma attached. And, again like an engagement, cohabitation becomes a concern if it endures for too long without resolving in marriage — a concern to parents and friends, if not to the participants.
Who lives together? The young, obviously. But also an increasing number of their elders. When one or both members of a couple have been divorced, a period of premarital cohabitation is almost always undertaken. The formerly married are generally inclined to approach remarriage warily, and by living together they are able to approach a marital relationship without making a commitment to each other for which they are not yet ready.
“My first wife and I never knew each other. We thought we were completely intimate because we went to bed a lot. All that told us was that we were sexually compatible. Marriage would be hell without sexual compatibility, but just because two people can get along in bed doesn’t mean they can spend the rest of their lives together. Living together entails a hell of a lot more than sleeping together.”
JWW: The speaker, a man in his late thirties, was divorced six years ago after ten years of marriage. Two years ago he began living with the woman who is now his wife of six months.
“I knew that I wanted to marry Betty before we started living together. I wouldn’t have wanted to live with her unless I felt that seriously about her. As far as we were concerned, sharing an apartment implied a commitment on both our parts. It didn’t mean we were definitely going to get married someday. It was no declaration of intent. It did mean that we were serious about each other and serious about our relationship. We lived together for a year and a half until we were more than certain that this was going to be a permanent thing. At that point we were closer to each other and knew each other far more profoundly than most of the married couples we know. Certainly far more than I ever grew to know my first wife, or Betty her first husband.”
And why, if their living situation was so good, did they ultimately marry?
“Not to start a family. I had had a vasectomy during my first marriage, so that wasn’t a consideration. Why did we get married? Because marriage is also a commitment, I guess, and we felt that we wanted to make that commitment to each other. We’re both basically very conventional people, you know. We never felt uncomfortable about living together before we were married, but I think we would have both been uncomfortable at the thought of going on that way forever.”
JWW: Had I written this same chapter only a few years ago, I would have had to deal at length with the ways in which partners in a non-marital cohabitational relationship dealt with guilts and anxieties attendant upon such a relationship. That such an approach is no longer warranted provides some measure of the change in our normative and existential mores.
The underlying causes of this change are much the same as the causes of change in our general views on the institution of monogamous marriage.
Certainly oral contraception has played a key role. “What if you get pregnant?” might be an inadequate argument against premarital intercourse, but became more powerful as an argument against living together. With the pill readily available, “I don’t intend to get pregnant” emerges as a valid answer. And more recently, with legal abortion increasingly obtainable, pregnancy has become a far less ominous prospect.
Too, the increasing capacity of females for independent lives has reduced the need for a woman to think in terms of immediate marriage. In part, these changes have developed out of the women’s liberation movement, but I suspect they have been more a cause of that movement than a result. A woman can earn a living; though her opportunities are somewhat proscribed, and though inequities exist in her relative earning power, she knows that she does not require a husband for her support.
Divorce is another factor. Just as it’s unarguable that marriage is a prerequisite for divorce, so has the increasing incidence of divorce made a generation of the young very wary of entering into matrimony. We have already heard from a man whose unsuccessful first marriage engendered a period of cohabitation prior to his second marriage, but it is not only the formerly married who display this sort of wariness. Virtually everyone coming of age today has had some second-hand experience with divorce. One’s parents may be divorced, or the parents of friends, or other relatives.
It’s interesting to speculate on those factors which produce social change. I could fill quite a few pages with such speculation, and no doubt the reader can supply other elements of contemporary living which have served to make living together less perilous while rendering it increasingly attractive for a substantial portion of the population.
Now, though, let’s take a look at some individuals who have elected to live together, in order to see the different ways in which these relationships develop and the manner in which they define themselves for their participants.
“When I was living with Les, it was really just a matter of convenience. Before then I had been in New York for about eight months. I started off at a residence for single girls, then took an apartment with one of the girls I met there. She moved out after two months. Then I advertised for a roommate and got one, but it didn’t work out. She was into drugs and wasn’t working, and it was a hassle to get her to move out, a real mess, so I decided not to try that again. There wasn’t much of my salary left after I paid the rent, but I was able to get by. I was sort of looking for a smaller place, but I couldn’t find anything decent, and I wasn’t looking too hard.
“I had met Les through a friend, and we went to bed together after we had known each other a few weeks. I had been seeing other guys, but there was nobody else I was balling at the time. We enjoyed each other’s company, and the physical part was good. Actually, I wasn’t particularly orgasmic at that stage in my life. I enjoyed sex but didn’t always come. Most of the time I wasn’t quite sure whether I had come or not.