Ruth Institute Blog

Lots of good stats in here.

by Carolyn Moynihan

When will young adults get the message that living together does not increase their chances of a lasting marriage? New analysis of US national data shows that, on average, cohabitation actually decreases by 6 percentage points the likelihood of marriage lasting 10 years or more. Read more…

I originally wrote this article, back when Love and Economics first came out. It has been reprinted more than anything I have ever written. I publish it here, for the benefit of new readers, who have never visited my old website. You can also download this as a pdf. I hereby give permission to reprint this, anywhere and everywhere that it will be helpful!

Research shows that cohabitation is correlated with unhappiness and domestic violence. Cohabiting couples report lower levels of satisfaction in the relationship than married couples. Women are more likely to be abused by a cohabiting boyfriend than a husband. Children are more likely to abused by their mothers’ boyfriends than by her husband, even if the boyfriend is their biological father. If a cohabiting couple ultimately marries, they have a higher propensity to divorce.

Most of the recent reports and commentaries on cohabitation report these difficulties, and at the same time, tend to downplay them. Living together before marriage seems to resemble taking a car for a test drive. The “trial period” gives people a chance to discover whether they are compatible. “You wouldn’t buy a car without taking it for a test drive, now would you?” Read more…

Carolyn Moynihan

Leading marriage scholars have come up with an index for monitoring the health of marriage in society.

Spring has sprung in the southern hemisphere and the wedding season is under way. A billboard in my city advertises a wedding “expo”, a sign of the trend that has turned a simple but dignified community event into a commercial extravaganza of daunting proportions. A young couple from abroad told me that it would cost at least forty thousand pounds to get married back home. That was one reason, apparently, why they had been cohabiting for six years. Read more…

Cohabitation Fast Facts

by Jennifer Roback Morse

Research shows that cohabitation is correlated with unhappiness and domestic violence. Cohabiting couples report lower levels of satisfaction in the relationship than married couples. Women are more likely to be abused by a cohabiting boyfriend than a husband. Children are more likely to abused by their mothers’ boyfriends than by her husband, even if the boyfriend is their biological father. If a cohabiting couple ultimately marries, they have a higher propensity to divorce. Read more…

by Trayce Hansen, Ph.D.

An accumulation of research from around the world finds that societies which endorse homosexual behavior increase the prevalence of homosexuality in those societies. The legalization of same-sex marriage-which is being considered by voters in several U.S. states-is the ultimate in societal endorsement and will result in more individuals living a homosexual lifestyle.

Extensive research from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and the United States reveals that homosexuality is primarily environmentally induced. Specifically, social and/or family factors, as well as permissive environments which affirm homosexuality, play major environmental roles in the development of homosexual behavior…

A Danish research investigation studied two million adults living in Denmark, a country where same-sex marriage has been legal since 1989. This study uncovered a number of specific environmental factors that increase the probability an individual will seek a same-sex rather than an opposite-sex partner for marriage.

For Danish men, the environmental factors associated with higher rates of homosexual marriage include an urban birthplace and an absent or unknown father. Significantly, there was a linear relationship between the degree of urbanization of birthplace and whether a man chose homosexual or heterosexual marriage as an adult. In other words, the more urban a man’s birthplace, the more likely he was to marry a man, while the more rural a man’s birthplace, the more likely he was to marry a woman.

For Danish women, the environmental factors related to increased likelihood of homosexual marriage include an urban birthplace, maternal death during adolescence, and mother-absence…

For American men, the environmental factor most related to homosexual behavior was the degree of urbanization during the teenage years. Specifically, boys who lived in large urban centers between the ages of 14 and 16 were three to six times more likely to engage in homosexual behavior than were boys who lived in rural communities during those same ages. The authors offer the following possibility: “an environment that provides increased opportunities for and fewer negative sanctions against same-gender sexuality may both allow and even elicit expression of same-gender interest and sexual behavior.” …

For American women, the environmental factor most associated with a homosexual or bisexual identity was a higher level of education. And though that was also true for men, the pattern for women was more dramatic. For instance, a woman with a college degree was nine times more likely to identify herself as non-heterosexual than a woman with only a high school diploma…

[Researchers] believe one explanation is the fact that with more acceptance, even encouragement, of homosexuality at universities, more university women embrace a non-heterosexual lifestyle. For an example of how that might develop, see Dennis Prager’s article entitled, “College Taught Her Not To Be a Heterosexual.”

Based on the findings of the American research study, environments that sanction and/or promote homosexuality induce more individuals to engage in homosexual behavior…

Social and cultural norms, as well as legal regulations, influence human behavior including sexual behavior. So not surprisingly, as the United States and other Western Countries have become increasingly pro-homosexual-socially, politically, and legally-they have experienced an upward trend in the number of individuals engaging in homosexual behavior. That trend will continue if we move beyond mere tolerance of homosexual behavior (which is appropriate) to formally honoring it by legalizing same-sex marriage.