Cohabitation: Freedom or Bondage

Cohabitation (trial marriage) burst onto the Western scene with the promise that it would protect both partners from abuse and a potentially bad choice. After all, either party could just walk away! However, many studies have already demonstrated that everything that glitters isn’t necessarily gold, especially when it comes to our relationships. For example,

• Spanish statistics, which have been highlighted in recent years by Europe’s Family Policy Institute (FPI), and recently reported by the Spanish Newspaper ABC, indicate that while only 11% of Spanish couples cohabit without marriage, such unions account for 58% of the most violent crimes between couples. For every one protection order issued for a married couple, ten are issued for cohabiting couples. (LifeSiteNews.com)

The big boast of cohabitation is that an abused or disappointed partner could merely walk away from a trial relationship without having to pull up his/her deeply driven stakes. Clearly, however, this hasn’t been the case. Ironically, cohabitation has multiplied abuse. This is especially true when it comes to the children of such unions:

• “Men in cohabiting relationships are four times more likely to be unfaithful…Depression is three times more likely…The poverty rate among children of cohabiting couples is five-fold greater…and 90% more likely to have a low GPA…Abuse of children is 20 times higher in cohabiting biological-parent families; and 33 times higher when the mother is cohabiting with a boyfriend…Cohabitation is bad for men, worse for women, and horrible for children. It is a deadly toxin to marriage, family, and culture.” (www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?print=1&did=0907-schneider

Well, if cohabitation doesn’t work, why does its popularity persist? I think that there are a number of reasons for this. For one thing, this institution tells us, “You can have it all without the cost of marriage, and right now!” However, I think that there is a greater rationale, perhaps somewhat imperceptible. Cohabitation fits our worldview – a worldview that has little regard for questions of moral absolutes.

Disdain for moral absolutes and the Christian worldview has been building for a long time. Its voice has been projected out from many quarters. Let me just take one example. The therapeutic community has systematically attempted to replace moral absolutes for self-actualization and other “religious surrogates.” In “One Nation Under Therapy,” Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel write,

• At the heart of therapism is the revolutionary idea that psychology can and should take the place of ethics and religion. Recall Abraham Maslow’s elated claim that the new psychologists of self-actualization were offering a ‘religious surrogate’ that could change the world. He had ‘come to think of this humanist trend in psychology as a revolution…new conceptions of ethics and values.’ Carl Rogers then looked upon group therapy as a kind of earthly paradise—a ‘state where all is known and all accepted.’ The sixties and seventies were heady times for Maslow and Rogers. They were promoting a visionary realignment of values, away from the Judeo-Christian ethic, in the direction of what they regarded as a science of self-actualization. (216-17)

As a result of this thinking, moral absolutes were disdained in favor of the “disease model” – we act in hurtful ways, not because we are morally irresponsible, but because we have a “mental disease.” Regarding this, Sommers and Satel give the example of addicts:

• Treating addicts as morally responsible, self-determining human beings free to change their behavior is, in the end, more effective, more respectful, and more compassionate. (7)

Instead, we have gravitated towards dehumanizing those we have wanted to help by conveying the idea that they are merely products of their society and by rejecting the moral, volitional dimension of their lives.

Nor did Rogers and Maslow dream up this anti-traditional worldview! It has been on the march for a long time. In 1945, Psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, president of the World Federation for Mental Health, stated something that wasn’t at all revolutionary, at least within his profession:

• The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking with faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy…The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains and are able to observe and think freely…If the race is to be free from the crippling burden of good and evil, it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.

It is no wonder that cohabitation and other forms of relational experimentation persist. If it isn’t morally wrong, why shouldn’t it!