Fast lane to failure?

Earlier this year, the Onion News Network, the video arm of the fake news empire, ran a story with the classic funny-cuz-it’s-true headline: “Nation’s girlfriends unveil new economic plan: ‘Let’s move in together.’ ”

“In a recession it just doesn’t make any sense for two people who say they love each other to pay separate rents,” the policy director of the so-called “Girlfriend Leadership Committee” testified before Congress.

While the satire poked fun at gender cliches – commitment-hungry girlfriends nagging reluctant boyfriends – it’s worth noting the larger issue behind the joke: Couples increasingly are living together before marriage, either to save money, spend more time together or test potential marriage compatibility.

For the more than 60 percent of Americans who live together before their first marriage (some experts say it’s closer to 85 percent), it seems like a harmless, and even wise, step for the divorce-wary.

But much of the evidence suggests otherwise.

Researchers for decades have churned out studies showing that living together before marriage leads to greater risk of marital discord and higher rates of divorce. (While not everyone is after a ring, 75 percent of people who cohabit do intend to marry, studies show.)

The so-called “cohabitation effect” used to be blamed on the notion that those shacking up were unconventional risk-takers who were not as committed to marriage in the first place, while those who waited were more traditional or religious types unlikely to divorce no matter how tough the going got.

Today, cohabitation is the norm, not some risque arrangement. And while the impact isn’t as pronounced as before, recent studies still show it can negatively affect a marriage.

According to a March report from the National Center for Health Statistics, men and women who lived together before they got engaged were less likely to reach their 10th anniversary than those who didn’t.

Among men, 53 percent who cohabited before they got engaged made it to the 10th year of marriage, compared with 71 percent who moved in together after engagement and 69 percent who waited until marriage to live together.

Results were similar for women: 55 percent of pre-engagement cohabiters made it to 10 years of marriage, compared with 66 percent who waited to move in until engagement and 65 percent who waited until marriage.

The culprit, according to one theory: inertia.

According to Scott Stanley, co-director of the Center for Marriage and Family Studies at the University of Denver, couples who move in together gather “constraints” – a shared lease, shared pet, shared cell phone plan, emotional attachments – that make it harder to break up if the relationship goes sour.

That inertia can push a cohabiting couple to marry when otherwise they might have broken up.

“It’s not that (living together) made your relationship crappier, it’s that it made it difficult to get out of a crappy relationship,” Stanley says.

His research shows that married couples who cohabited prior to engagement report poorer communication, satisfaction and commitment than their counterparts.

Too many couples slide into cohabitation without discussing the implications and expectations for the future, Stanley says. The cash-strapped, the clingy and the more committed partners are especially vulnerable to moving too quickly and then getting sucked into an unhappy marriage, he says.

Ironically, the people most likely to move in with their significant others are the children of divorced or never-married parents, because they hope living together will help them weed out incompatible partners before they walk down the aisle.

Stanley advises against moving in together to “test” a relationship; it often indicates there’s a problem that could be better addressed through discussion or relationship workshops, he says.

But some sociologists think there’s merit to the notion of cohabitation serving as a pre-emptive strike to a doomed marriage.

Living together provides “deep insight into a person you can’t get any other way,” including fidelity and trust issues, says Paula England, professor of sociology at Stanford University.

Jay Teachman, a sociology professor at Western Washington University who has studied cohabitation, says age (older than 26) and education (a bachelor’s degree) are far more important predictors of marital success than cohabitation, which he believes has no effect on divorce rate – except for one group.

Serial cohabiters – those who have had more than one live-in romantic relationship – do have a significantly greater divorce risk, his research has found.

“These people are, just like the original cohabiters, the risk-takers, not as committed to