Prince William and Kate moved in together about a year ago. In this clip above the commentator suggested that maybe Prince Charles and Princess Diana would not have divorced if they had lived together before marriage. Actually Diana was a virgin, and it was Charles’ uncle (Louis Mountbatten) that gave him the advice that he should seek to marry a virgin.
He added that no studies have ever shown cohabitation to benefit relationships.
Harriet McManus discounted the notion that couples can go through a “trial marriage.”
“[I]t’s really more like a trial divorce,” she said at a press conference at the Family Research Council. “The only question is whether you break up before the wedding or after the wedding in a legal divorce. As one of our marriage educator friends says, you can’t practice permanence. Of 100 cohabiting couples, 85 break up before or after the wedding, leaving only 15 couples in a lasting marriage after 10 years, and who knows how many more divorces after 10 years.”
Women who cohabitate are more likely to be abused and to be depressed than women in a marriage, studies cited by the McManuses say. Additionally, men and women in a live-together arrangement are more likely to cheat on one another. But perhaps most concerning, couples who cohabitate are nearly just as likely as married couples to have children — meaning that the failed relationship has an impact beyond the man and woman.
“The children feel abandoned when one parent moves out,” Harriet McManus said. “That causes a great deal of trauma for the children, tripling the odds that the child will be expelled from school [compared to] those raised in an intact family.”
