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September 26, 2005

Choose your own adventure

I read an odd thing in Thursday's National Post:

Anne-Marie Ambert, a sociology professor at York University, said her review of recent research shows that couples who lived together before getting married face as much as double the risk of separation as those who lived apart.

Now, I have a rule: statements that are 100 percent counterintuitive are probably at least 50 percent wrong. The above is no exception. Here's what Ambert actually says in her study:

Do couples who cohabit before marriage divorce less than others?
No, on average they divorce more, at least in Canada, the U.S., and Great Britain. The Canadian General Social Survey found that, in the 20-to-30 age group,[1] 63% of women whose first relationship had been cohabitational had separated by 1995 compared to 33% of women who had married first (Le Bourdais et al., 2000a).

Note the term "first relationship" above (it means first conjugal relationship) — this already comes up short of showing that couples who cohabit before marriage divorce more often than others. Céline Le Bourdais et al.'s study, which Ambert references above, comes up even shorter:

Starting conjugal life in a common-law relationship, as opposed to a marriage, sharply increases the probability of this first union ending in separation. And whether the common-law partners eventually marry or not makes little difference: the risk of separation is just as high. In the 30- to 39-year group, for example, almost two-thirds (63%) of those whose first relationship was common-law had separated by 1995, compared with one-third (33%) of women who had married first.

Their conclusion, in other words, was simply that common-law relationships are more likely to end in separation than marriages. In still other words: duh. An analogous study might put 500 lemon wedges and 500 orange wedges in a bag and ask blindfolded participants to pick one and suck on it. I can see the Post's headline now: "Half of Canadians dislike citrus fruit, study finds."

Other sources for Ambert's conclusions are no less equivocal. LeBourdais' and Évelyne Lapierre-Adamcyk's paper, "Changes in Conjugal Life in Canada: Is Cohabitation Progressively Replacing Marriage?" (abstract only), presents data specific to child-bearing couples:

Compared with the families formed directly through marriage in Canada outside Quebec (the reference category), married couples who lived together before marriage appeared to have a 1.66 greater chance of separating following the birth of their first child. In other words, starting conjugal life through cohabitation rather than marriage increased by two thirds the risk of separation among parents who had already married by the time their first child was born.

This also boils down mostly to "common-law relationships fail more often than marriages" and, though the 66% figure is certainly striking, there are many mitigating factors in play. The study controlled for the demographic characteristics of the couples in question, but it didn't control for the reasons people get married. Especially in the earlier years in which the data in question was being gathered (1970-1995), unplanned pregnancies would often have led to unplanned marriages. These arrangements would have benefited the child in some cases, and in some cases not, but certainly one would expect to find more divorces coming from such marriages than from those formed on more mutually voluntary grounds (especially as divorce laws were being liberalized).

And in fact, in an e-mail, Ambert pretty much agrees:

I suspect that, in future studies, what they will find, as times change, is that those couples who are already committed to each other ("engaged") and go on to cohabit before getting married (for financial reasons, for instance, or just to be together) will have the same risk for divorce as others who don't cohabit before they marry. The problem right now in terms of methodology… is that all types of cohabitations are lumped into one category so that we can't differentiate between those that are just "glorified dating" from those that are "trial marriages" from those that are already committed and so on.

Well, yeah — that's a pretty huge problem, alright. I'd be happy simply to chalk this up to another newspaper mangling another scientific study if it weren't for Ambert's apparent complicity in it. I find it difficult, for example, to reconcile her statement above with what she told the Post here:

"We used to hear the term trial marriage, but it just isn't that. If living together was really a trial marriage, you would expect that those who lived together before would have a better relationship when they're married ... and therefore would divorce less," Prof. Ambert said.

"Well, quite the contrary happens. Those who cohabit have up to twice the rate of divorce after they're married."

She cited a 2000 Canadian study that found, in the 20-to-30-year-old age group, a 63% separation rate for women whose first relationship was co-habitational compared with 33% among those who married before moving in.

As we've just seen, the 2000 Canadian study in question doesn't support what she just said in the slightest. Nor does the quite reasonable implication in her e-mail message — that when good people get married for the right reasons, it doesn't matter whether they live together first or not — jive with this generalization:

The under-25 age group is the most approving of cohabitation, she said, an attitude she predicted could lead to a higher overall divorce rate.

"As a researcher, you look at this for policy implications, and these statistics worry me," she said.

"I don't think that the impact on society is very healthy. More children are going to be born in more unstable family structures, so it's going to be costly for the welfare system, for the schools, mental health and even jail."

Or with this:

"If I were a young woman who wanted to get married and have children -- which means by definition that I want to have a solid marriage -- I would not cohabit before marriage or would cohabit only once I am engaged,'' she said in an interview yesterday.

Good gravy, what a way to run your life. Imagine: certain that you're meant to be with your lady love for the rest of your life, sick of wasting money on two apartments and wanting to iron out any housekeeping incompatibilities before the big date, you propose cohabitation. "But wait," says she. "In 20 years' time, social scientists will combine our experiences with those of all other Canadians of our age — yes, including all the meth addicts, wife beaters, child molesters, arranged marriages and insurance executives — and they may well find that more couples who shacked up before marriage got divorced than those who kept their distance."

Choice: Do you nod sagely, surrendering yourself to the whirling statistical cosmos of fate? (Return home to your basement apartment.)

Or: Do you say, "But honey, we know we're good people — I haven't touched meth in months. By shacking up, then getting married and living happily ever after, we're positively influencing the very statistics you're trying to use to keep us apart." (Open champagne, break lease, suffer through latest John Mayer release.)

_______________________________
[1] As far as I can tell, this is incorrect — the statistics appear to be for the 30-to-39 age group.

[Update October 7: I don't disagree with the jist of Barbara Kay's October 5 column, which was loosely on the topic of cohabitation, but it certainly would have been better off without the reference to Ambert's study. Two days later, unreptentant cohabitator Adam Radwanski took umbrage with Kay's column and made a lot of sense.]

Posted by Chris Selley at September 26, 2005 10:04 PM

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