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Divorce Revolution Spawns the Cohabitation Generation
Divorce Revolution Spawns the
Cohabitation Generation
Hoping to avoid the difficulties they saw in their parents' marriages, many young
adults are skipping marriage in favor of living together outside of marriage. But
does this solve problems or create new ones?
by Cecil Maranville
There was an outside chance 30 years
ago that a youngster might know a child from a home broken by divorce. Nowadays there
is an outside chance that a youngster might know a child from a home not broken
by divorce. Children living at home with their married biological parents are increasingly
oddities.
Are these statements hyperbole? Maybe. Maybe not. A quiet but phenomenal change has
swept through Western civilization. It's so quiet few seem to know about it. Fewer
still seem to think it matters.
Over the course of the last few decades, societal norms have evolved from viewing
divorce as a stigma to seeing it as normal, natural and often necessary and desirable.
Sociologists call this change in attitude the divorce revolution.
The children of the divorce revolution don't buy the cavalier philosophy that divorce
is normal. They are taking steps that will--they think--help them avoid the pain
and other costs associated with broken marriages. In short, the divorce revolution
has spawned the cohabitation generation.
Unmarried cohabitation, or living together, is the status of couples who are not
married to each other, but are sexual partners sharing a household. God reveals that
sexual relations outside of marriage are harmful and damaging: "Flee sexual
immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual
immorality sins against his own body" (1Corinthians 6:18, emphasis added throughout).
Why? What does God know that people lately have been discovering the hard way?
Far from insignificant, the trend toward living together is nothing short of revolutionary.
In the United States about 11 percent of couples lived together before marriage between
1965 and 1974; 44 percent cohabited before marriage between 1980 and 1990; more than
50 percent of couples marrying today lived together before marriage. Almost 60 percent
of American high-school seniors agreed or mostly agreed with the survey statement
that cohabiting is usually a good way to prepare for marriage.
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