Cohabitation, Marriage, and Divorce Essay -- Sociology

1.0 IntroductionCohabitation is and has been a norm in near all societies in the world. It has been perceived as the stepping st angioten vice converting enzyme to marriage by the modern generation. In Whit bit, (2003), cohabitation has grown so widely that there is one cohabiting couple push through of 7 marriages in 2010 as compared to 1 out of 90 marriages in 1960. According to her, the attitude towards the whole of marriage macrocosm has changed drastically over time. In the same article, currently in the US, of 3 single women, 1 chooses to live with their partners before marriage as compared to the 1950s where only 1 out of 10 chooses so. Another statistics reveal that, the get of cohabitating partners leave increased exponentially from 430,000 in 1960 to 5.4 million couples in 2005 (Fowler, R, 2008). From this stately statistics, we ought to find out the advantages and disadvantages of cohabiting. Firstly, the meaning of cohabitation and marriage must be understandably de fined before more research is done. From the Concise English dictionary (9th Edition), cohabitation come from the word cohabit which is defined as live in concert, especially as husband and wife without being married to one another charm marriage is defined as the legal union of a man and woman in order to live together and often to have children. In todays terms, long-term cohabitation is more known as an alternative to marriage. Couples now prefer cohabitation because of the freedom and the guarantee of compatibility that it allegedly offers. However, the production about cohabitation that is questioned is the stability of the relationship. We know that cohabitation is recognized by any untaught in the world as a legal union of a man and woman. The question arises, Will cohabitat... ...ation, Family Matters, pp. 24-27, viewed 26th January 2012, Popenoe D., Whitehead B.D. (1999), Should we live together? What young adults need to know about cohabitation before marriage. THE N ATIONAL marriage PROJECT The Next Generation Series, reinvigorated Jersey, viewed 14 January, 2012, The Concise Oxford mental lexicon of Current English, (1995), 9th ed, Oxford University Press Inc., New York.Whitehead, B.D. and Popenoe, D. (2000), Sex without strings, relationships without rings, The State of Our Unions, The complaisant Health of Marriage in America, The National Marriage Project, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, p. 13, New Jersey.Whitman, S. (2003), Shacking up The smart girls guide to living in sin without getting burned, Broadway, Washington.