Cohabitation Nation

De Facto, Sambo: Language, Part I | Posted 7:11 PM

Katrina Gulliver on Australia's latest terms for unmarried relationships: "The rich have partners, football players have fiancees, criminals and welfare recipients have de factos. Whit Stilman said that 'shacking up' means living together when you don't like one of the people concerned. Here, de facto means someone's live-in partner when you don't like either of them."

Earlier this month, W.P. Hughes in Chicago wrote to me in response to the Salon interview:

During a recent trip to Scandinavia, I was AMAZED to see that of all the long-term couples I met (and some with children) none were married. As you know, they enjoy the same benefits as "married" couples... the word they use to describe "the person [they] live with" is Sambo (pronounced almost the same way it sounds, with a Swedish lilt on the end). Since there isn't a similar English equivalent -- or at least American equivalent -- I've been encouraging friends to use it, changing the spelling and pronunciation to "Samby" since "Sambo" (like Little Black Sambo) doesn't fill one with quaint memories of earlier days in the U.S.

Dorian and I devote a chapter to "unmarried introductions" in Unmarried to Each Other. These were the most popular terms in the United States:

1. partner (also life partner, unmarried partner, domestic partner)
2. boyfriend/girlfriend
3. significant other or S.O.
4. the person's name without a descriptive word
5. friend
6. husband/wife
7. roommate or housemate
8. lover
9. spouse
10. sweetie or sweetheart

Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? | Posted 7:29 PM

Thomas Byrne Edsall writes in The Atlantic Monthly about attitudes towards sex as a litmus test for voting patterns:

Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions. (Someone taking the liberal position, as pollsters define it, dismisses the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong, admits to looking at pornography, doesn't look down on a married person having an affair, regards sex before marriage as morally acceptable, and views religion as not a very important part of daily life.) According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors—and better indicators of partisan inclination—than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter (black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic)....

In a 1998 paper on American sexual behavior Tom W. Smith, the director of the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center, at the University of Chicago, found that among people born before 1910, 61 percent of the men and just 12 percent of the women reported having had sex before marriage. These percentages have grown through the generations, much more dramatically among women than among men. Ninety percent of the men born in the 1940s had sex before marriage, as did 63 percent of the women. And of the women born since 1952, only 20 percent reported having been virgins when they married. Many women—and many men, too—cherish the rights that fall under the post-1960s rubric of autonomy and personal freedom, strongly valuing their sexual and reproductive independence. They are willing to vote based on this cluster of issues—and when they do, they vote Democratic.

NY Times Update: The Early Morning Thump | Posted 9:43 PM

My friend G. points out the need not only for single rooms on campuses, but also wider beds: "A case for double beds in dorms...dammit kids today should all have to expereince the early morning *thump* that wakes you up and reminds you that you had a guest sleep over last night...who is now ON THE FLOOR," she says.

Metro | Posted 9:13 PM

Boston Metro interview today, on page 3 (Adobe Acrobat file). The Metro is a popular paper with riders of public transit, sparking an amusing conversation with a fellow T rider today.

MM: "What did you think of the interview?"
Fellow rider: "I think there should be a group for unmarried people."
MM: "If you moved in with somebody, would you buy the book?"
Rider: "Possibly."

Prevention of Sexilement | Posted 9:43 AM

The New York Times reports on the trend towards offering college students single rooms:

Changing attitudes toward sex also have led students to insist on their own bedrooms, Mr. Rawn says. "There's a lot of cohabitation," he said. "That privacy is very important to the students."

Rebecca Hoskins, a 21-year-old nursing student, has a single bedroom in an apartment in Mr. Rawn's new high-rise on Northeastern's campus, not far from Boston University. "It is convenient that you don't get sex-exiled for the weekend," she said, referring to students who are banished from their rooms when their roommate's boyfriend or girlfriend spends the night.

Scotland Update | Posted 1:18 PM

Anne Barlow challenges "strait-laced leaders to do the honourable thing" in this Scotland on Sunday op-ed:

SCOTLAND on Sunday’s poll confirms that marriage is no longer the only style of family chosen in Scotland for parenting and partnering.

While marriage is still popular, with one in three being married, cohabitation is increasingly common, especially among the young.

One in seven of the population is cohabiting, and among under-25s cohabitation is twice as common as marriage...

In many Commonwealth countries, including Australia and Canada, cohabiting and married couples have equal legal rights because it is recognised that cohabitation now performs the same functions of child rearing and homemaking as marriage and people should be protected in the same way. Not to do this arguably gives a partner with money a perverse incentive to cohabit rather than marry and increases the vulnerability of the financially weaker partner (often the children’s main carer) with little or no redress when things go wrong.

Given the introduction of registered partnerships for same-sex couples in most other European jurisdictions (now also proposed in England) and a new interpretation of human rights legislation in the English Court of Appeal, requiring tenancy succession rights available to married and cohabiting couples to include same-sex couples, is now the time for the difficult issue of the legal vulnerability of all cohabiting couples to be more comprehensively addressed in Scotland?

How brave will the Scottish Executive be?

Capturing Cohabitation On Film | Posted 4:45 PM

Cohabitation is popular with college students, reports Penn State's Daily Collegian. I'm always amused by the photos and b-roll footage that editors use to accompany articles and TV segments about living together. There's the ever popular kitchen genre, which includes photos of couples doing the dishes together, preparing a meal, or sitting around the table enjoying coffee, tea, or a glass of wine. There's the bedroom genre: we've actually had more than one photographer suggest that the best place to capture the spirit of our cohabitation would be to snap a photo of us in bed. The Daily Collegian puts a new twist on things with this photo, which you can see in context if you scroll to the end of the article. The man commands the couch and the remote, while-- and I hope this is only an optical illusion-- resting his feet on his girlfriend's back?

Upcoming Event: Crimson Cohabitation | Posted 8:57 PM

Dorian and I will be at the Harvard Coop for a discussion and book signing of Unmarried to Each Other on February 6.

Fixed! / Expectations | Posted 6:54 PM

No sooner do I submit my last post, the archives return. Now we can get back to the subject matter at hand. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is interviewed by Suzanne Wilson in the Valley Gazette. She says:

I'm certainly not ready to say - ban cohabitation. It is a form of courtship, but it is so ambiguous with respect to what each person expects out of it ...

I do end up with a kind of caution about it. It often begins in a casual way, but very often one or the other [expects] that this is a start down the road toward a permanent commitment - only to discover that that might not be what the other person had in mind.

I do think there at least has to be a discussion ... about what it means and what your hopes might be. I did hear from so many women that they had a different expectation than their boyfriend and that was a shock to them.

While I've been known to disagree with Dafoe Whitehead, the point about expectations is so well-taken-- I couldn't agree more. We devote the first chapter, of Unmarried to Each Other to it: how make sure that you are on the same page as your partner about your reasons for moving in together. If one of you thinks living together is a great way to get a "roommate with benefits" and save on rent, and the other thinks it's a serious step towards marriage, you are headed for trouble.

Rite of Passage | Posted 6:34 PM

Disappearing archives seem to be a chronic problem and a rite of passage with blogspot. Cohabitors J. and P., to whom I was just raving about blogs to over the weekend, are probably glad they are sticking to writing their dissertations instead of troubleshooting problems like this. Fortunately, MOP has offered his help. Too bad we're not playing Hide Seek NYC, or a Zagat's Guide would be in order.

Technical Difficulties | Posted 2:09 PM

Sorry folks, we seem to be having some technical difficulties with the Cohabitation Nation archives. If any savvy blogspot user out there knows how to fix it, email me. I have tried republishing to no avail. Stay tuned, we'll get this solved.

"Polemical without being chippy" | Posted 5:47 PM

"A new book just published in the US... is gaining attention in Britain," says The Observer.

In search of Chris Otto | Posted 11:30 AM

Mike Palmer is looking for a long lost friend named Chris Otto and is hoping the Internet will help. I'll add the names of two elementary school friends I'd love to hear from: Chris Barowne of Cooperstown, NY and Egan Maresca, who I last saw in a suburb north of Baltimore. The Internet does help: many friends from high school and college have surfed in and reported on their cohabitations.

Salon | Posted 10:30 PM

Salon's readers weigh in on the state of unmarriage.

"We're not looking to get married when we're 21 and graduate." | Posted 7:01 PM

Occasionally, a daily newspaper will hit the mark, and provide page after page of fascinating stories that provide hours of fodder for future dinner table conversations. The Washington Post succeeded today, with three pages of stories on the peace rally, glimpses into the world of David Frum and XFM radio, and finally, "The Buddy System-- Sex in High School and College: What's Love Got to Do With It?" by Laura Sessions Stepp. I've previously written briefly about the stereotype that men want cohabitation and women want marriage. The article is a challenge to another, similar, stereotype: that all women want is love and all men want is sex. This is not to say, of course, that the reverse is true, as the article makes clear.

Highlights of the article:

The girl hookup culture is known in some circles as Ally McBeal feminism. Dozens of young women described it for this story, some as participants, others as observers. The gist of what they said is this: Many girls don't have the time or the energy required for an intense relationship right now, or they can't find a guy who wants one. But they possess enormous sexual energy and believe they have every right to enjoy it in whatever form they choose, just as the Fox network's lusty lawyer did...

At Brown, so many freshmen hook up with other freshmen in their dorms that they've given it a name: unitcest...

The Bowling Green researchers were surprised by how secure girls were about their relationships. Girls expressed significantly more confidence than guys that they could refuse a date, for example, or break up with someone they no longer wanted to go out with, or control what a couple did together.

Boys were more likely to say they would change themselves for a girl than the other way around. (Teen girl magazines encourage these makeovers. "Find a look he -- and you -- will love," gushes Seventeen's current prom issue, suggesting a guy wear black Euro pants, a Ben Sherman shirt and hair gel that will match the color of the girl's dress.)

Girls' sexual confidence shows up in surveys. In the Toledo research, girls were more likely than guys to say they decided how far a couple would go. In a nationwide study soon to be released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, young women ages 15 to 24 were less likely than young men to report feeling pressured to engage in intercourse...

Most significantly, hooking up requires no commitment of time or emotion, at least that's what is assumed. You can hook up once during a party, once again after the party with someone else and later in the week with a longtime friend. It seems the perfect entertainment for young women planning to graduate cum laude and take up medicine or law...

They also know that their parents expect nothing less than academic and professional stardom. As one college freshman notes wryly, "We're not looking to get married when we're 21 and graduate."

Canada Update | Posted 6:14 PM

Cohabitation is common in Quebec, and Canada treats unmarried couples in a way much more similiar to France, Sweden, and other European countries than the U.S. Celine Le Bourdais, a professor at the University of Montreal says, "We don’t see [Quebec’s trend of unmarried couples] as a problem as long as couples and children are supported." Tell that to State Farm Insurance, where policies "snub live-in partners," but cover cover spouses, relatives [and] even visitors," according to Flordia Today.

Housing Discrimination | Posted 7:48 PM

An article in North Dakota's Bismarck Tribune, points out that the repeal of the anti-cohabitation law won't prevent landlords from discriminating against unmarried couples. Landlord example #1: The University of North Dakota, which provides married and family student housing, but won't let unmarried couples share an apartment. In undergraduate dorms, that's understandable, but for universities with married and family housing it's a clear case of marital status discrimination.

Public Commitment | Posted 7:38 PM

The Long Island town of Southampton debates the possibility of a domestic partner registry, "a list of unmarried couples who want to publicly make a commitment to live with and support each other."

Uninterrupted Cohabitation | Posted 7:01 PM

Caitlin Flanagan provides an entertaining look into the world of "Wifely Sex" advice books in The Atlantic Monthly. "There is nothing like uninterrupted cohabitation and grinding responsibility to cast a clear, unforgiving light on the object of desire," she says.

North Dakota Update | Posted 6:47 PM

Things are moving along quickly in North Dakota. As they should. It makes a mockery of all laws to have one the books which forbids something most people do before marrying today.

Legal Progress | Posted 10:22 AM

Unmarried sex is no longer illegal in Georgia and a North Dakota lawmaker wants to repeal the state's cohabitation law.

Today's Ink | Posted 8:44 PM

The Star-Tribune says Unmarried to Each Other "is a useful guide through legal, employment and extended-family issues for unmarried men and women who decide to live under one roof. Chapter 4, 'In It for the Long Haul,' is a top-notch collection of advice for couples who want to keep their relationships strong -- with or without a marriage certificate." The Boston Herald's Joe Sciacca says cohabitation "sounds like something you do in a Biosphere 2 experiment."

Really? | Posted 6:29 PM

Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council tells The Washington Post, "Children need to be taught that love is a decision, not a feeling, and that divorce is not the best solution for unhappy or disappointing marriages." (Emphasis mine.)

Celebration of Partnership | Posted 6:02 PM

Today's Times is full of marriage-related news, but the best part is the announcement of the celebration of partnership of Stephen Abrams and Doug Harrison. Doug was a good friend of Dorian's and one of our housemates in our senior year of college. Congratulations to the couple!

Note to self: Now that (1) you are almost 30 and (2) the Times covers commitment ceremonies as well as weddings, make a habit of reading the entire "Wedding/Celebrations" section and not just the Vows column.

Promise Rings | Posted 2:32 PM

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead answers this question in U.S. News and World Report:

You write of the ambiguity of cohabitation. But are promise rings the answer?

There's a growing recognition by family and friends that when a couple decides to move in together, it may mean something other than convenience. As that happens, there will be ways that the transition is marked. Pre-engagement rings are an interesting marketing response. I don't think it's trivial. Engagement rings, when they first appeared, may have seemed silly.

I think it's a great idea to find a way to acknowledge moving in together as an important life transition. In Quebec, some say it's common for newlycohabs to throw a party. Dorian and I have taken to sending "congratulations" cards.

Gawker | Posted 2:27 PM

Less than a week old, Cohabitation Nation is already turning heads. JVG says "it's bound to be the sexiest blog around." JA reflects: "V. promising blog." MOP remarks, "Truly the first great news of 2003." Our work is cut out for us.

Reader Response | Posted 12:42 PM

Dorian and I have long discovered that just about everybody has an opinion about marriage and cohabitation. Just answering the casual question from some seated next to you on a plane, "What do you do?", can spark a 30 minute monologue. Once delayed in a North Carolina airport for five hours, we got into a lively discussion with our fellow passengers in an airport bar (the only establishment in the airport offering any type of comfortable seats) in which just about everybody, even those seated three booths away, weighed in.

While a few people are openly disrespectful, most aren't, and I immensely enjoy these conversations. They are entertaining, often engaging, educational, and occasionally provide the chance to change someone's mind. The emails that have been streaming in from the Salon interview provide a similar opportunity (more on these in a future post), as does, I am discovering, having a blog.

Anthony found this site and offers his opinion here. What intrigues me most is when he writes, "If a marriage is going to break-up over how a person squeezes toothpaste or because they prefer the toilet paper rolling from the top, then there are more issues going on than separate bathrooms can solve." This reminds me of my interview with Jacquie for the book. Here's an excerpt of the chapter on considering cohabitation in which she explains why she plans not to live with her long-term partner:

As [Jacquie] explains, their hearts were compatible, but their habits were not.

I take the soap off the wrapper and throw the wrapper away. But he likes to keep the wrapper. I have shoes galore, I love my shoes. This man takes his shoes off and throws them in the middle of the floor. He says, "If we lived together I would have to kill you in two days because you’re always picking up my shoes. I know where my shoes are." But I say, "You can find them better in the box." Can you imagine these two people living together for the rest of their lives? We tried it for a month and it was no good. It was like eating ice cream when know you have a lactose intolerance.

Jacquie’s relationship with her partner survived because they agreed never to live together. She says that now, after not seeing him for four or five days, "When I do see him, it’s like drinking a glass of cool water."

No Good Men Left? | Posted 4:20 PM

A Wall St. Journal review [available at WSJ.com if you are a subscriber or here if you're not] by Meghan Cox Gurdon of Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's new book, Why There Are No Good Men Left, blames cohabitation for the difficulty some women in their 30s have in finding partners. While I certainly don't doubt the challenge that many face in finding a lifelong marriage partner, the blame on living together is misplaced.

Point to ponder #1: Gurdon states that by age 40, 72% of women "have been married at least briefly." But my reading of the Census data puts that number at least 88%, and the Census projections of women currently in their 30s, 92% will eventually marry. That leaves 8% remaining, some of whom are in same-sex relationships and can't legally marry, others of whom are women who choose not to marry their male partners.

Point to ponder #2: Gurdon's "most women have been married at least briefly" statement is telling. If you push people to marry (as she plans to do with her daughters) instead of live together, you run the risk that what would have been cohabiting ending in breakup, instead become starter marriages that end in divorce (more on that issue in Pamela Paul's book, The Starter Marriage). Just the other day I was talking with a radio producer who said cohabitation worked really well for her precisely because she was able to learn, by living with her boyfriend, that he was really a jerk who expected her "to be his mother." She was happy to have known that before deciding to marry him. Which brings me to:

Point to ponder #3: Most anti-cohabitation writers like to pontificate on how cohabitation is bad for women, good for men: "one party (in this case, the woman) is at a severe, almost punitive disadvantage." This always strikes me as odd, since the people who are most often gung-ho about cohabitation and the work of AtMP generally have been women, where in most surveys, it's the men who want to get married. We issued a press release on this a few months back when the National Marriage Project was singing this tune.

Unwedded Bliss | Posted 10:42 AM

The Salon.com interview.

Abstinence | Posted 7:53 PM

Phil Donahue tells subscribers of the Donahue Daily Update today, "In the 'No One Asked Me' Department: Speaking as a parent, if my daughter was marrying someone she'd never had sex with, I'd be worried not comforted."

B-Day | Posted 8:50 AM

Book of Ages co-author Lockhart Steele celebrates his birthday today.

Life Imitates Cover Art | Posted 9:30 PM

B. writes to Dorian, "I thought you'd appreciate this visual. Last night, T. and I were laying on my bed reading your book, paying special attention to your top 10 relationship builders. Great reminders, too. I especially like the hugging with your whole self (arms and legs) and the impromptu backrubs. The best part was, after reading some of your book and drifting lazily into a body facing body nap (we were clothed), I noticed that your book was still between us and that T. and I were holding hands underneath the work exactly like the picture on the cover. I told T., 'Dorian would appreciate this moment...'"

Legitimate Relationships | Posted 9:15 AM

A feature on Morning Edition today considers a bump in the marriage rates between Iowans and Kenyans. It begins by profiling a woman who went to Kenya as part of a college student semeter abroad program and fell in love with a Kenyan man. When she later announced their engagement to her friends and family in Iowa, instead of the usual "congratulations" she was met with questions and concern about whether they were marrying so he could get a green card. The article then goes on the describe some marriages that we're perhaps more in the INS red flag department, such as a woman who did know her husband's last name.

The article raises very basic questions about the process of determining whose relationship should be considered "legitimate," at least for INS purposes, and whose is not. When whether or not a couple as legally married is the primary test, challenges arise. Some people will marry strangers in return for money, while same-sex couples who have shared a life together for years won't be considered.

The American Way of Wedding | Posted 10:59 PM

Christine Stolba raises an eyebrow at the wedding industry in a National Review article. Overall, I think this is a great topic to be addressing: the intersection of capitalist economy and marriage, an area in which both traditional family values types and alternatives to marriage types can shake their heads at the transformation of marriage into a consumer product. This was best summed up for me by the words of bridal consultant whom I debated on a TV talk show a few years back. She sounded positively gleeful when she told the host, "A lot of people are getting married. Getting married, getting divorced, and coming back to get married!"

Stolba's description of Unmarried to Each Other is slightly off target: while you can have a commitment ceremony that looks just like it's ripped from the pages of Brides magazine, most are much lower budget (we profile in detail five couples with five very different commitment ceremonies in the book). And many long term unmarried couples have no more desire to walk down the aisle than they do to sign the marriage license.

She also missed the biggest wedding industry muckraking book of all time: Jaclyn Geller's "Here Comes The Bride." Geller spends hours in bridal boutiques trying on wedding dresses and doing all the things Upton Sinclair would have done as she explores the modern day wedding factories. And she's blessed with a brilliant ability to coin a phrase, such as calling honeymoons "erotic tourism for the newly married."

SconeBlog | Posted 12:10 AM

In honor of Mike Palmer my domestic partner and I had scones as a midnight snack tonight. Cranberry.

Irony | Posted 8:58 PM

The first baby of the new year is born to lesbian moms (who can't legally marry), while the Bush administration announces that government grants have been awarded to religious groups to advance marriage.

Clarification | Posted 6:17 PM

Anyone who shares my interest in the cohabitation news knows of the word's many uses. For example, when the Pope says:

"Despite the serious and repeated attacks to the serene and joint cohabitation of peoples, peace is possible and right," during a New Year's Day Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, you know he isn't talking about shacking up.

Nor do I plan to address the "political cohabitation crises" currently underway in Sri Lanka in this blog.

By "cohabitation," I mean what the dictionary I was given by the local Rotary Club upon my high school graduation describes as "living together in a sexual relationship when not legally married."

New Year, New Blog | Posted 5:05 PM

It's a New Year's resolution to start a blog. Credit goes to LS, MOP, and JVG for inspiring this foray. Speaking of resolutions, The Seattle Times includes Unmarried to Each Other on its list of "Books that help you keep those New Year's resolutions."

The Seattle Times [photo snapped while I was on book tour in Seattle in November]

Unmarried to Each Other [Marlowe & Company, November 2002]