Yeranen Yaakov: "Try Before You Buy" Fails

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Tuesday, July 14, 2009

"Try Before You Buy" Fails

Living Together First Can Spoil Marriage, Study Finds

2 Comments:

At Tue Jul 14, 10:12:00 PM 2009, joshwaxman said...: this seems like an extremely flawed study.

for one example (but this is not the only immediately apparent flaw), more than 70% *did* cohabit before marriage. it would seem that it is a relatively small sample that did not. and then one should ask if there is something *about* that sample that makes them somehow exceptional.

now, it is quite possible that a good number of that small less than 30% are religious. could it be that their religious values make them see divorce as less of a possibility, and make them value and work towards stability in their marriage?!

if so, it is not the living together which is causing the spoiled marriages, but rather the same outside influence (religious belief or lack thereof) which causes both the cohabitation/no cohabitation and failure/success of the marriage.

correlation is not the same as causation, and from the description of the article, it seems that those running the study did not realize or account for this.

(another example: many of those who chose to cohabit did so to test the relationship, implying that they had doubts about the relationship. and it was those that "scored high on measures of negative communication". wow! so surprising that those whose relationships were rocky had relationships which were rocky. this is tautological, rather than an interesting thing the study discovered.)

there is more, but enough for one comment.

kt,
josh
At Tue Jul 21, 08:53:00 PM 2009, thanbo said...: Anecdotally, however, I was very opposed to living with my wife before marriage, on the grounds that most of my cousins and friends who had done so, the marriage fell apart within a relatively short time.

We weren't all that religious yet.