Cohabitation Takes The Best Years Of Our Lives
This article appeared in the West Australian, 26 November 2007.
Last month's census figures revealed a worrying social trend - the rise and rise of cohabitation. Living together is becoming ever more popular - in every census period between 1986 and 2006 there has been a steady 2 to 3 per cent growth in cohabiting couples.This is not good news - for people concerned about our country's fertility rate, for older women hoping to become grandmothers or young women looking forward to their own families.
What's happening is most people now spend their early 20s living together. More than 40 per cent are still in live-in relationships through to their 30s. This means many waste their young adulthood in relationships going nowhere, suggest Ruth Weston and Lixia Qu from the Australian Institute of Family Studies, who point out cohabitating relationships are becoming more unstable and less likely to lead to marriage. This means more and more people ending up on their own in their late 30s, the critical last-chance years for fertility.
In the past 10 years the percentage of women on their own in their late 30s rose 5 per cent, with similar increases for solo women in their early 30s. People living together all too often avoid the hard questions. They drift into live-in relationships to save rent money or avoid the hassle of living in two houses.
Think how different that is from deciding to get married. Most people who marry at least try to think about whether they are right for each other. Is this really husband material, the man I want as father to my children? Could I live with this woman for the rest of my life? OK, we still make mistakes. Lots of them. But at least there's some attempt to check out mutual commitment.
Of course, it is usually the woman who worries more about where the cohabiting relationship is heading. If she wants to have children, she's the one with the very narrow window of opportunity to pull that off. But it is very easy for her to delude herself that cohabitation is the start of something wonderful when the hard questions are never asked.
Men can afford to take a more relaxed attitude to wasted years and they do so, according to research by Barbara Whitehead and David Popenoe, co-directors of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University.When they asked unmarried men aged 25 to 33 why they weren't married, many said cohabitation provided the benefits of marriage without the downside, with many wanting to wait until they were older to have children.
Research by Ms Weston's group suggests that differing views on having children significantly increase the risk of break-up of cohabiting relationships. These couples often haven't thought through or discussed whether they want children but accidents do happen. It's not surprising that we are seeing many more children born to defacto couples - up from fewer than 3 per cent in 1975 to 12 per cent in 2000, according to data. But sadly the evidence is that the presence of children doesn't make these relationships any more stable. That means more children ending up in single-parent families - another worrying trend.
But cohabitation isn't the only time-waster for single women. The other common trap is the affair with the married man. Talking to women who end up on their own in their late 30s it is striking how many have spent years with a married man, wishing and hoping that he'll make good his promises. That rarely happens and it's the woman who misses out. Yet it seems likely even more women will end up burnt in this way, given the huge numbers of single professional women who spend most of their 30s in offices surrounded by married men. All those hours spent poring over legal briefs together, sharing take-away Thai in office boardrooms - is it surprising that intimacy flourishes?
But none of this is in women's interests nor good for our society. Our changing patterns of social interaction are working against the goals most people still yearn for - a companion through the years and the comforts of family life.