Sami WunderCEO, Dating and Relationship Coach For Ambitious Women / 1200+ client success stories / Mum / Wife

Living together before marriage?

28 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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1:28

In this solo advice video, Sami Wunder addresses the common question of whether couples should live together before marriage. He cites research indicating that couples who cohabit prior to marriage have a significantly higher likelihood of divorce or breakup compared to those who wait. Wunder introduces the "inertia effect" as a key explanation: living together makes a partner the convenient, default choice for marriage, turning the decision into one of convenience rather than deliberate commitment based on compatibility, attraction, or willingness to work through challenges. He argues that because the marriage is founded on convenience, it is more prone to later problems. Wunder also tackles the practical objection—how can a couple know what married life will be like without cohabiting first? He contends that the experience of marriage cannot be simulated by cohabitation; even when living together, the relationship remains an exclusive sexual partnership, not the distinct, broader context of marriage. Consequently, he concludes that cohabitation before marriage is not a reliable predictor of marital success and may actually increase the risk of marital failure.

Chapters

Should you be living together with your partner before marriage? This is a question we get all the time inside Elevate, and you're not going to like the answer. Studies overwhelmingly show that couples who live together before marriage end up in divorce or a breakup with a much higher probability than couples who do not live together before marriage. Now, one simple explanation for this is the inertia effect, which basically means that when you're living with somebody, they become the convenient choice to marry. But the marriage then is born out of convenience and not out of a deliberate commitment, not out of intentional compatibility, intentional attraction, intentional willingness to make things work. And of course, this is why such marriages suffer down the line. Now, you might also be asking yourself, but if I do not want to live with the person that I like before marriage, Then how do I know what it's going to be like to live with them after marriage? Well, the answer to that is, you cannot know how it is to be with someone in a marriage until you're married to them. And so even if you are cohabiting and living together, you are still operating in the context of an exclusive sexual partnership and not in the context of what it truly feels like to be married, which is a very different context.