Marriage Lite Just Not The Real Thing
This article appeared in the West Australian, 14 November 2005
Why are so many women ending up childless and single? One major reason is Marriage Lite. Many women who are solo at midlife have wasted precious breeding time in live-in relationships that look hopeful but go nowhere. That's why they end up stranded.
Such cohabitation is changing the social map of this country. Social scientists are busy studying the living-together phenomenon, recognising that this social trend is not only having an impact on fertility but pushing back the average age of marriage and adding to family break-up and single-parent families.
It started off as something very different. Back in the 1970s when the trend for couples to live together first caught on, it was all about a "trial marriage" - couples checking out each other's personal habits to see if anything unspeakable emerged. In those more conservative times, it was called "living in sin" but for most it was merely a detour on the way to the altar. That's changed. Now less than half (43 per cent) of cohabiters marry, while 38 per cent separate, leaving only a small number staying together unmarried, according to the Australian Institute of Family Studies research.
Now young people's first live-in relationship tends to be de facto rather than married, which means women are older when they do end up marrying and trying for children - bumping up the risk of fertility problems. But many others end up serial cohabiters and that's where the real trouble strikes. "They are sliding, not deciding," explains Scott Stanley, a cohabitation researcher working at the University of Denver.
People slide into cohabitation without ever making the explicit decision to commit - someone's lease runs out or lovers get tired of rushing home for fresh underwear. People living together often don't ask themselves the hard questions. We tend to be far fussier about whom we marry than whom we live with - which can lead to wasted years in relationships that one person sees as the start of something wonderful and the other simply as somewhere to pass time.
As Barbara Dafoe Whitehead points out in her book Why There Are No Good Men Left, cohabitation carries huge opportunity costs for women, eating up precious years when they could be seeking out good husband and father material. While they are waiting for Mr Not Ready or Mr Maybe or Mr Someday to make up his mind, women who want children miss their chance to meet men keen on fatherhood. Spend a decade or so in and out of these relationships and poof! - the 30s simply disappear.
Marriage Lite just isn't the real thing. Married people are significantly happier than de factos, finds Mariah Evans from Melbourne University. But that changes in the second-hand market - divorced people who live together are as satisfied with their lives as marrieds. Ms Evans suggests this older group is past the nest-building stage where they seek the security of a formal marriage. Divorcees have done that and no longer need the piece of paper.
What's really worrying is the sliders also slip into becoming parents. There are growing numbers of children born to de facto couples - up from less than 3 per cent in 1975 to 12 per cent in 2000, according to data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Survey.
The bad news is these children don't provide extra glue to keep these inherently unstable relationships together. Sociology professor David de Vaus from La Trobe University has found cohabiting couples who have children are far more likely to break up than married parents. So Marriage Lite means more children ending up in single- parent households with all the consequent higher risks to their welfare.
The more educated women tend not to breed in these circumstances - they usually hold out for the security of marriage. While Marriage Lite also leaves plenty of less educated women reaching mid-life unpartnered. Many are single mothers. In 2001 almost half of unpartnered women without post-school qualifications were lone parents There are perils in playing house. Perils for our society, perils for women keen to hear wedding bells and the patter of tiny feet. That's what mothers need to tell their adult daughters.