Cohabitation is not the same as marriage

Minister Mary Coughlan has instigated a series of meetings around the country on the subject of family. No doubt three very different factions will be represented, writes Breda O'Brien

There will be the ones who will cheerfully ignore the vast amount of sociological evidence which suggests that marriage is the optimum family form for child-rearing. These people will suggest that any small group of people can constitute a family and that there are no particular advantages to any specific family form.

Then there will be the people who consider that the male breadwinner model is the only viable option. Finally, there will be those trying to pick their way through the maze, to acknowledge both the research and the reality, and to base policy suggestions on what is best both for individuals and the common good. The last-mentioned group will be immediately categorised by the media as belonging to the second group, and the first group will be beatified. No matter how much we pride ourselves on our newly found openness and maturity, there remain some things which we self-censor.

In the past, it would have been unthinkable to suggest that unmarried mothers deserved support and not censure. Now it is impossible to say that marriage, on the whole, is a better environment in which to raise children, and a valuable foundation for society which we should not lightly dismiss. Part of the inability to say these things stems from praiseworthy sensitivity. The shameful fact that families incarcerated their daughters and sisters in homes for fallen women and took away their children is still within living memory.

Quite rightly, no-one wishes to stigmatise lone parents, or to suggest that children born outside marriage are somehow second-class citizens.

Yet our new attitudes may also hide a new individualistic ethic. It suits us to regard marriage as some kind of private arrangement between two people. We may pride ourselves on our kindness or our non-judgmentalism, whereas it may actually be closer to Thatcherism, a belief that there really is no such thing as society.

We tend to act as if there were only two alternatives. Either we have to enforce the kind of savage ostracisation of lone parents which happened in the past, or we must adopt an extreme version of laissez-faire. The latter attitude ignores the vast amount of research which says much the same thing - on average, that children need and deserve a father and mother who will provide security, and the greatest security is to be found in marriage. To even suggest such a thing is to provoke howls of outrage, and comments about chaining people to abusive marriages.

The fact that most marriages which break up are not abusive seems to be neither here nor there. Nor is the fact that research shows that couples who stay together are likely to be happy that they did so five years later.

There is, of course, a middle way, which is supportive of those who are not in two-parent marriages, but also gives people the chance to make real choices by giving them full information. Recently, on a programme which I presented along with David Quinn, we quizzed John Bruton as to why successive governments had failed to support marriage. With disarming honesty, he admitted that most politicians are afraid to suggest new things, because they are afraid of taking a hammering from the media. Take cohabitation. There is a strong move to make long-term cohabiting partners equivalent before the law with legally married couples. Oddly enough, no-one seems to reflect on the fact that this means that some couples would wake up one day realising that even though they never consciously got married, they would de facto be married before the law.

Marriage is not so elastic a concept that it can be stretched to whatever definition we wish. One of its defining characteristics is giving mutual consent to the public recognition of a union between a man and a woman. If we make it indistinguishable from the union of those who have given no such consent, we make a mockery of it. Cohabitation is not the same as marriage.

On average it is much less stable, and there is more domestic violence within it than in marriage. Most problematic of all, perhaps, is the situation of children. More than half of cohabiting couples will split up by the time their child is five, compared with 8 per cent of those who were married at the time of the birth. Living together for a short while before marriage is the least harmful form of cohabitation, though there is no evidence that it is helpful. The longer you cohabit before choosing to marry, the greater chance of marital breakdown. The Australian Institute of Family Studies' Australian Family Formation Study found that after five years of marriage, 13 per cent of those who had cohabited prior to marriage would divorce, compared to 6 per cent of those who had not cohabited.

After 10 years, the proportions were 26 per cent for those who had cohabited and 14 per cent for those who had not. After 20 years of marriage it is estimated that 56 per cent of marriages of "cohabiters" will have ended in divorce compared to 27 per cent of those where partners did not cohabit prior to marriage. According to the authors, "it appears that this association [between cohabitation and later marital disruption] is beginning to take on the status of an empirical generalisation".

There may be some kind of self-selection at work here, in that those who are more committed to each other, and therefore more likely to work at their marriage, may also be more likely to chose to marry rather than cohabit. But even controlling for this, some studies show that cohabitation is inherently less stable. Not only is cohabitation poor preparation for marriage, it is poor preparation for cohabitation, because the more often you cohabit, the less likely you are to establish a long-term successful partnership.

The sad thing is that our self-censorship makes it highly unlikely that most couples will receive this kind of information, or that the Government will act on it. Which might be all right if it were only the happiness of adults which lay in the balance, rather than the happiness of vulnerable children.