Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Skepticism Rising About Just Living Together

Lynn Smith Los Angeles Times

In Los Angeles, an independent, professional woman contemplating a first marriage initiates a survey of her friends: Is it better, she asks, to marry or just live together? The consensus surprises her. “Marry!” they chorus.

In Seattle, a schoolteacher and a doctor begin dating. On one of their first dates, the teacher mentions she once lived with a man and would never do it again outside of marriage. He sighs with relief. He’d never do it again either.

Across the country, therapists are quizzing couples who want to live together: Why don’t they want to get married?

It’s becoming clear that living together, a lingering artifact of the counterculture ‘60s, is being viewed in the cool light of the ‘90s much like lava lamps and earth shoes.

Some say opting for marriage is a sure sign of our uncertain times and growing social conservatism.

“It’s a time when people are looking for more traditional ways of being in the world because it’s scary not to,” says Marianne Walters, a therapist in Washington, D.C. Others say it’s a positive sign of growing up.

As yet, the neo-traditionalists do not constitute even a statistical blip. According to the latest U.S. Census, the households of “never married, unmarried couples” are still rising and now number more than 1 million. But the numbers are starting to level off, says Los Angeles therapist Marcia Lasswell, president of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists.

Women in particular, she says, are more independent, choosier and wonder what’s in it for them. When couples move in together, she says, the housekeeping chores often revert to women.

“They think, ‘Why should I do that? If I’m going to give up my freedom for a man, I want to be married,”’ she says.

Lasswell says couples who view living together as a first step toward commitment are usually deluding themselves. Most couples who live together do not go on to marry later, she says. Women pushed by their biological clocks and hoping to marry are wasting time living with men who, guided by “social clocks,” aren’t yet ready, she says. Those men cannot commit to a relationship until they feel stable enough.

Moreover, living together offers no legal protections.