Cohabitation

[Phan Thi Thu Minh]

Hi everybody,
Next week, I'll have a presentation about cohabition, but I don't know the problem clearly. therefore, I hope to receive many ideas from everybody.
I lives in Eastern where the custom is different from other countries( Western), especialy in cohabitation. In Eastern, people can't except that while people don't suprise in Western. Many young people cohabit and it's the trend now. Why people do that? What are advantages of cohabition? Do you think it the best way to test your partner before you get married to him/her? What are the ways to solve this problem?
please discuss and share you opinion about that.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Thank you very much. see you soon.
Minh
PS: correct my sentemces and mistakes. thanks alot.

[Jamie (K)]

In the US about 50 years ago, cohabitation was very unusual and rather scandalous, but it got to be more common after the late 1960s, which is basically when public morality began to collapse.

People think that living with someone before marriage ensures that the couple know each other better when they finally do get married, but there are studies that have shown that marriages between two people who have cohabitated are more likely to break up than those of people who never lived together before marriage. That's because when living together, many people keep their "dating face" on, and their partner doesn't get to know their real personality. Another reason is that people who live together without marriage are more likely to be weak at making commitments. Often the man has no intention of getting married at all. In English, we say, "Why buy the cow when the milk is free?"

[Ralf]

Hi Jamie,

Phan Thi Thu Minh's question is an interesting one indeed. I'm on the verge of moving in with my girlfriend, but I'm not sure it's the right time yet. We've been seeing each other for almost a year now, and she's been going on about moving in, marriage and babies for the past half year or so.

[Jamie (K)]

Ralf, as far as the "dating face" is concerned, as extreme examples, I have seen cases where a couple moved in together and everything went fine until marriage. Then, as soon as they were married -- literally as soon as they were married -- the man revealed himself to be a sociopath and started severely abusing the woman. It was as if once he had her in his clutches, he could drop the façade.

If you don't believe in God or The Church, or some near equivalent, then you basically have no basis for your moral decisions other than gut feeling and mental rationalization -- or civil law, which largely originates with God and The Church. I would guess the reason you don't go completely depraved and turn into Hitler or something is that you have been instilled with the equivalent of a religious conscience by people who actually were believers (possibly handed down through a generation or two of nonbelievers). I think it was G.K. Chesterton who said, "People who don't believe in God don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything." That said, I'm probably more radical in this conviction than the Church itself, which believes that there is a natural law that's built into the human soul and can be discerned even by people with no religion.

Marriage involves a group of public and legal commitments that few cohabiting people make to each other. If they are lived up to, they serve as protection for the mother and children, and they protect the man's rights to his role in his own children's lives. The legal hurtles set up by marriage ensure that (most) people don't pull out of it on a whim at times -- or even for periods of years -- when they don't feel like remaining in the marriage. (I have seen people claim they endured, say, five bad years in their marriage, and that the relationship became blissfully happy after that. Cohabiting people won't endure that long.)

Ralf, I think you've visited my city and seen the devastation in parts of it. That mess was not created only by bad political leadership and (comparative) poverty. (Poor people in the US are rather affluent by world standards.) The biggest damage was done by a breakdown in marriage. The change in public acceptance of cohabitation coincided with the rise of the welfare state, and in those neighborhoods women started marrying the government instead of men. The result is that there are entire neighborhoods in those parts of the city with few or no men. The men exist mainly to breed for the purpose of increasing government assistance to the women, and the boys have almost no example of male behavior other than on TV. They certainly have no daily exposure to a male role model. These sad little guys grow up very confused, and they have an astronomically larger probability of becoming criminals than kids from intact families.

A bit off the subject -- and this is really weird! -- over the past few years I've decided that Western society would benefit from adopting a tradition of early, parentally supervised marriage. There are some teenagers who go out of control at an early age, and those particular kids would benefit from a parentally supervised marriage commitment. Of course, this would require institution of some rather non-Western practices, such as marriage deals negotiated between families, but all in all, I think it would be a superior arrangement to the promiscuity and out-of-wedlock childrearing such kids engage in now. Basically, I think the hillbillies were on to something when they married some kids off early.

[Ralf]

I was raised in a society that was (at that time) 99% catholic. Divorce not possible, abortion not possible, contraception not possible, having your girlfriend in your room around tea time (dinner time) or afterwards not possible. This society changed in the 1990s when EU subsidies and American investments brought affluence to Irish shores. After the turn of the century, only less than 80% ticked the roman-catholic box on their registration sheets, a significant 20% loss in a matter of a decade. Today the country's back on its belly, and I'm sure that more people turn back to the church and god.

I agree that there are good values in christianity. But that doesn't make people better human beings. My blood curls at the thought of the priest who came to my school to prepare us for confirmation. There was so much ignorance and fake bigotry in the country back then it was ridiculous. But families stuck together and somehow made things work. I don't want to judge what's better.

The nicest folks I've ever been in touch with were the Sherpa in Nepal. Those people are Buddhists who won't kill their chicken but don't mind if their Hindu neighbour does it for them. In those two weeks I spent in the Himalaya mountains I only ever met nice people and never felt taken advantage of once. One of my best memories is a conversation with a lodge owner: "My mother in-law is building a house next door." -- "Oh really?" I said, feigning faux delight. "Yes, very good karma. I am really happy." And he was.
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[Jamie (K)]

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with restrictions on divorce, because I've seen so much of the devastation wrought by "no-fault" divorce. I also don't see anything wrong with severely restricting abortion, because as it is now, the woman can kill her child just to look good in a bathing suit on vacation, and the father has no say in the matter. I don't have any problem with things like single-sex dormitories with restricted visiting hours, extreme parental supervision of their children's social behavior with the opposite sex, etc. These are things I would have been against when I was in my 20s, but I've seen too many people's lives damaged by the laxness that began after the 1960s.

My understanding is that Irish society had some pretty bad problems of its own in the past, such as forced marriages and people abused by family members without recourse. These were not based in the doctrine of the Catholic Church, and very frequently were violations of it. Many of the ideas you were probably taught are and were considered heretical by the church, but heretical on the fanatical side, rather than on the liberal side. I know that in the 1940s the pope excommunicated a priest because he wouldn't stop teaching that non-Catholics automatically go to hell.

I know perfectly well the things you saw in the church in Ireland, because they brought it to America, and I was subjected to it as a child, as the Irish and their children were dominant among clergy here at the time. I had a nun who'd lived in the convent since she was 12, for catechism in the 6th, 7th and 8th grade. Every week she would fixate on one of the prettier girls in the class -- her boots, the length of her skirt, or the length of her bangs -- and she'd go off on an uncontrolled, stream-of-consciousness tirade about the depravity of youth. My devout Catholic father kept me away from this type of person as much as he could.

Notice that after "God and The Church" I added the words "or some near equivalent". The Buddhists you were exposed to also have a religious tradition based in natural law, but they were apparently not subject to the mental disorders your clergy in school displayed.