What changes after ‘I do’? Marriage following years of living together, only to separate soon after

In today’s world, a couple living together before they wed seems normal and understandable. So too does getting divorced after a brief marriage, given the complications that can result from sharing a house and routine. But when you mix the two together, the situation gets confusing: if they were living together before the wedding and nothing dramatic has happened, like cheating for example, what changes after the celebration? Obviously, one goes back to day-to-day life with its familiar joys and miseries. But there are couples that seem to suffer a kind of “I do” curse, as in the recent case of Chenoa and Miguel Sánchez Encinas — who have separated a year and a half after getting married — or that of the actor Lukas Gage and Chris Appleton, Kim Kardashian’s hairstylist, who have announced their separation six months after their vows in Las Vegas (complete with a private concert by Shania Twain).

The act of getting married can be a ceremony freely chosen out of love and hope on the part of both spouses, it can be driven by one party, or it can be a day at which one arrives via family pressure. Perhaps this can help explain couples who separate quickly after the wedding. Susana Ivorra, a psychologist who specializes in romantic relationships, identifies some motives that fall into this rubric. “There are some couples (both members or one of them) who see the act of getting married (the ceremony, the party, the honeymoon) as a dream or a project for revitalizing a relationship in crisis, or to see if there is a level of commitment that in reality, they are not feeling, as if it were enough to convince oneself that all is well, that they’re moving forward, that the relationship is on the right track”. Living together first would indeed help to see if the relationship is working. But when it doesn’t, marriage is quite possibly not the answer. Neither would be having kids.

Although the relationship might seem to be the same before and after the “I do”, the act can lead to a psychological change for partners, rendering the relationship more formal or upping its level of commitment. That can have negative consequences, insofar as something that could have been considered more or less temporary becomes, officially, a life to be spent together. And even if there’s no logic behind it, this can reflect in a certain change in attitude that can impact a couple for whom, at the start, things were going well.

But becoming official can also have positive consequences, as Noah commented on an Internet message board about weddings: “Yesterday we made it to our first month as a married couple. We have already been living together for two years, so we didn’t think much would change, that our day to day would be the same… But no! We’re closer than ever, more affectionate, we trust each other much more… Emotionally, we’ve noticed a big change. I feel much closer to him and I feel like our love has grown. His post received numerous responses confirming similar experiences, some of them blissfully unexpected, from those who were not anticipating significant change after a mere wedding.

In these cases, there’s no clear reason for marriage’s effects, beyond the couple’s own values. “The level of commitment in a marriage is no greater than that of living together, because it’s as easy or difficult to separate as a married couple as it is for a couple that lives together. There are couples who never wed and live their commitment in a more conscious manner than those who merely get married. We should choose our relationship every day, independently of which papers have been signed”, says the psychologist and couples therapist.

To live together or not live together before marriage, is that the question?

One report by the Institute for Family Studies, published last April, offered information that might be surprising: living together before marriage increased the risk of divorce. In particular, according to its data, 34% of married couples who lived together before the wedding end up getting divorced, compared with 23% of those who started living together after getting married. This goes against the popular belief that living together before marriage helps to judge true compatibility.

Fine-tuning that theory, the study, called Cohabitation Experience and Cohabitation’s Association With Marital Dissolution, arrived at the conclusion that couples who live together before they get married have a lower rate of divorce in their first year of marriage, compared to those who did not live together. But it also found a relationship between divorce and living together in the longer term, with the investigation’s results pointing to benefits of previously living together in the short term, but drawbacks in the long term for marital stability. Of course, the fact that two events happen at the same time doesn’t necessarily imply that they have a cause-effect relationship.

But the matter doesn’t end there. A more complete analysis of studies that have been done regarding the relationship between premarital cohabitation and divorce put these findings in doubt. The article Cohabitation and Marital Dissolution: A Comment on Rosenfeld and Roesler (2019) criticizes the methods that were used in the previously cited study, and states that “premarital cohabitation is not associated with marital instability”. That’s the same denouement to which the study Premarital Cohabitation and Marital Dissolution: An Examination of Recent Marriages arrives.

In the face of opposing conclusions, one must turn to common sense. On one hand, a divorce will surely have several causes, and on the other, living together before marriage is the best way of testing out a couple’s day-to-day understanding. Such are the thoughts of psychologist and couples therapist Susana Ivorra, “if you want to get to know another person well; their manias, their habits, you can get an idea from going to their house every once in a while. But it won’t be until you live with them day to day, with all the routine and obligations that implies, until you get to know them on a deeper level. You will never fit perfectly into someone else’s habits, and even less so if you have already become accustomed to your own. That’s not the goal, but there does need to be a certain level of affinity”.

Realistically, saying “I do” after living together changes nothing, though it seems to change everything. In the end, the truth is that the strongest bond might be that of a 35-year mortgage.

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