Cohabitation

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

— Genesis 2:24

Cohabitation is an unmarried couple’s practice of sharing a home and an ongoing sexual relationship without marrying.¹ It has become the norm rather than the exception on the way to marriage in the United States, where a majority of adults of childbearing age have lived with a romantic partner outside marriage at some point.¹ Because it joins sexual intimacy to a shared life without the marriage covenant Scripture places around both, cohabitation is a form of sexual immorality rather than a morally neutral prelude or alternative to marriage.¹

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter naming cohabitation, a modern term for a practice at its current scale. It does state that marriage, between one man and one woman, was ordained by God “for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and the preventing of uncleanness.”² Sexual union belongs within this confessional structure rather than apart from it; cohabitation places sexual intimacy outside the marriage the confession describes as its proper setting.

Biblical Basis

Genesis 2:24-25 gives the pattern Scripture assumes for sexual intimacy: a man leaves his family of origin, holds fast to his wife, and the two become one flesh, “naked and unashamed.” Cohabitation inverts this order, seeking the intimacy without the covenant commitment that makes it unashamed.¹ Ephesians 5:3 instructs that “sexual immorality (porneia) and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you.” The underlying Greek word, porneia, is not limited to any single act but names sexual activity generally wherever it falls outside marriage as God designed it, which is enough to place cohabitation under its scope.¹

Jesus himself addresses a woman who was cohabiting, in John 4. He tells the Samaritan woman at the well, “the [man] you have now is not your husband” (John 4:18), rejecting the idea that living together without a marriage constitutes a marriage, even as he goes on to offer her mercy and the truth of who he is.¹

Opposing Views

Some who cohabit before marriage argue the arrangement functions as a trial period that improves the odds of a successful later marriage, or appeal to practical reasons, such as shared housing costs, an existing sexual relationship, or, among older adults, preserving retirement benefits tied to a deceased spouse.¹ When cohabitation began increasing in the 1970s, some scholars expected couples to use the arrangement to screen out bad matches before marrying, and so predicted it would lower the divorce rate.¹

Objections and Responses

Living together before marriage tests compatibility and reduces the risk of a bad marriage. The prediction that cohabitation would screen out bad matches did not hold up: the opposite pattern emerged in the data through the 1980s and 90s, and while a cohabiting couple’s marriage may hold together slightly better in its very first year, the long-run divorce risk for couples who cohabited beforehand remains higher than for those who did not.¹ The relationships themselves fare worse too: compared to married couples, and even compared to dating couples who don’t share a home, cohabiting couples report weaker commitment, less satisfaction, more frequent conflict, and more physical aggression.¹

Two people who love each other and intend to marry aren’t doing anything wrong by living together first. Branch responds that intent to marry does not supply what the marriage covenant itself supplies; premarital sex, cohabiting or not, “amounts to a futile attempt to act as if married while taking more and offering less than married love requires.”³ Abortion rates track the same divide: one 2008 study put the rate among married women at 6.6 per 1,000, against 52 per 1,000 among cohabiting women, an eightfold gap that raises the stakes of treating cohabitation as morally equivalent to marriage.¹

Related Doctrines

References

J. Alan Branch, 50 Ethical Questions: Biblical Wisdom for Confusing Times (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021), chap. 24, “Should We Live Together before We Are Married?” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 25, “Of Marriage,” para. 2. ↩
Branch, chap. 24: “Premarital sex amounts to a futile attempt to act as if married while taking more and offering less than married love requires.” ↩