Partners Who Break Up

    Living together instead of marrying will not make breaking up any easier emotionally. In fact, many of the same emotions arise during the end of a cohabitating couples’ relationship as those that arise at the end of a marriage, said Roger Lake, a marriage and family therapist in San Francisco, Calif., who has been in practice more than 20 years. “Emotionally, if you look at what people go through in a breakup that seemed securely attached, they go through same emotional dilemma,”  Lake said.            

The people outside the couple, family and friends, may be more blasé or casual about the breakup because the couple did not commit to marriage, Lake said. But the couple will still be reeling from the emotional upheaval of moving out. “Essentially, at the level of individual feelings, I think it is pretty similar,” Lake said.            

Lake said that when the emotions of a breakup run high, therapy is the answer. Talking to a professional about the hurt and frustration can help keep one’s emotions in check, Lake said. And if not therapy, than talk to a trusted friend or family member, he said. “You need to step back and look at this and get some perspective,” Lake said.            

Being leery of the breakup of a marriage may play a role in choosing to live together instead, Lake said. Some of the people he sees in his practice were emotionally wrenched by their parents’ divorces, and they are unwilling to join into holy matrimony themselves. “Some people, for emotional issues, don’t think of marriage as a particularly happy state of being,”  Lake said.            

Some people choose to live together for philosophical issues, and some for political perspectives, he said. Some live together because they legally cannot marry, he said. And there are more still cohabitating because they want a close, intimate relationship, but the finality of committing to marriage is more than they can manage, he said.  


COHABITION OUT OF CONVENIENCE              

Couples are not be choosing cohabitation over marriage because they are trying to test the waters, according to Sharon Sassler, assistant professor in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University. Since 2000, Sassler has been studying the reasons couples choose to cohabitate, and she has found consistently that couples choose more practical reasons to live together. They are not living together mainly as a precursor to marriage, she said.            

“My research finds that marriage may be a latent reason for moving in together, but is generally not the main reason given for cohabiting. By that I mean that respondents sometimes talk about moving in to see if the relationship might lead to marriage, though they generally mention other reasons first, convenience, finances, the need for a place to live, for example,” Sassler said.

That may be, she said, because people tend to move in together earlier in their relationships than they would feel comfortable talking about marriage said she specifically asks her participants why they decide to move in together, and they rarely say it is to see what marriage will be like.