Coffin Corner

To:          Editor of OnMilwaukee.com

From:    Mike McManus

Re: “Couples Should Live Together”

Your columnist, Sarah Foster, recommends that couples live together before getting married.  This is foolish advice that can be quickly disproven.  She provides no evidence of her assertions – not a single study which proves her claim.

According to Census 7.5 million couples are already taking Ms Foster’s advice.  But only 1.4 million will marry.  That means 6 million couples will break up, while a few will continue living together and not break up or marry. However, that’s an 80% failure rate before there is a wedding! The cohabiting  experience is so searing that tens of millions have failed to marry. The number of never-married Americans tripled from 21 million in 1970 to 63 million in 2008. Result: the marriage rate has plunged 51% since 1970.  In fact, just since 1990, the number of marriages has fallen from 2.44 million to 2.08 million, a 15% drop while population grew 25%.

Also, couples who cohabit who do marry are 61% more likely to divorce than couples who remain apart before the wedding, according to  a study by Prof. Paul Amato and others at Penn State.  Prince William and Kate Middleton may be successful in their marriage,  We all hope so, but less than 10% of those who begin with cohabitation will be able to build a lasting marriage.

There is a better way to decide whether to marry someone.  As a co-author of Living Together: Myths, Risks & Answers, I recommend these steps to cohabiting couples:

1.Move Apart.  That step will increase your odds of making a wise decision about whether to marry, before you become too entangled.  Separation will increase your objectivity.

2. Take a Premarital Inventory, a detailed questionnaire of 150+ items to assess objectively your strengths as a couple,  and areas of conflict that need to be discussed.  PREPARE/ENRICH is the best inventory.

3.  Meet with an older couple trained to review the inventory.  My wife and I have trained 4,000 couples to be Mentor Couples to administer an inventory, such as PREPARE/ENRICH.  In our home church over the decade of the 1990s, we prepared 288 couples for marriage, an increasing percentage of whom were cohabiting.  Of that number 58 couples decided NOT to marry, a big 20%.  Such couples have avoided a bad marriage before it began.  But of the  230 couples who did marry, we know of only 16 divorces, a failure rate of 7%.  In other words, this strategy offers a 93% success rate over nearly two decades.  To learn more, call me at 301 469-5870.

4.  Create a Community Marriage Policy.  I am President of Marriage Savers, an organization which has helped the clergy of 229 cities adopt a covenant called a Community Marriage Policy.  Some Milwaukee churches have taken an interest, but have not organized a CMP.  On average, the divorce rate of communities in which a CMP is signed, enjoy a 17.5% drop in the divorce rate for the whole city, according to an independent study of our work.  Some cities like Austin, Kansas City, Modesto, CA, El Paso and Sale, OR cut their divorce rates by 50% to 70%!  In addition, the cohabitation rate of CMP cities dropped by one-third compared to other cities.  And their marriage rates are rising, such as a 16% increase in Evansville IN. 

To learn more, write, Mike@MarriageSavers.org, or see the attached article.

Blessings,

Mike McManus

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My new email address is mike@marriagesavers.org

Michael J. McManus
syndicated columnist
"Ethics & Religion"
President & Co-Chair
Marriage Savers
9311 Harrington Dr.
Potomac, MD 20854
www.marriagesavers.org
301-469-5873