ARTICLE: SAYING "YES" BEFORE SAYING "I DO": PREMARITAL SEX AND COHABITATION AS
A PIECE OF THE DIVORCE PUZZLE

Helen M. Alvare*

Introduction
 
The signs of the times for sex and marriage are very mixed in the United States today. There is more freedom to talk about human sexuality, and more opportunity for improving healthy sexual experience across the life span. The "double standard" for judging men and women is fading, and women's sexual health and happiness have become more important. There are also signs of improvement in some of the signal problems resulting from decades of experimentation with long-established sexual norms. The United States is, for example, in a period of stabilizing (though still high) rates of adolescent ² sexual experience, pregnancies and births following several decades of sustained and visible public alarm over these phenomena. Yet at the same time, rates of births to unmarried mothers recently registered a rise, and the number of cohabiting couples continues to increase. ³

On the marriage front, we are somewhere past the beginning of a movement to scale back the high divorce rates that have frightened and mystified us for the past several decades. A recent flurry of public and private proposals seek to bring the tools of psychology and the power of state encouragement to the task of preserving intact families, particularly for the sake of children. And research is proceeding apace about why couples divorce, what might be done about it, and the efficacy of different approaches.

More and more frequently, this research is demonstrating a correlation between premarital sex and cohabitation, and an increased risk for divorce ...