Does cohabiting enhance compatibility?

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Cohabitation is the state of living together and having a sexual relationship without being married. Most of the arguments that disapprove of cohabitation hinge on how it promotes sexual acts and multiple body counts.

This is why people’s stance on cohabitation is not solid; it borders around the issue of ‘what ifs’, especially what if the relationship fails.

I think people only frown at cohabitation because of sex, but in essence, sex is very little in the grand scheme of things. The truth is that partners who do not cohabit seem to have more sexual partners than cohabiting partners.

Though sex is often a by-product of cohabitation, this argument against cohabitation distracts partners away from many fundamental issues that cohabitation brings and solves.

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Essentially, cohabitation is a serious business. One should not just jump at it and cohabit with anyone. It is for a serious relationship that is already heading to marriage, not a relationship with no direction yet. You can visit often if cohabitation is not feasible.

This is why I believe cohabitation is not for everyone, especially people who are not yet ready for marriage. The not-yet-ready-for-marriage folks are people who abuse the sanctity of cohabitation.

Secondly, although cohabitation does not guarantee that the partners are going to have a successful or lasting marriage, yet it helps partners discover and understand each other more, especially what they like or prefer, whether the other partner snores at night or refuses to flush the toilet after use.

It is true that one can cohabit and have full knowledge of one’s partner but one may still have big issues in marriage. However, this does not invalidate the relevance of cohabitation because the number of unbearable surprises in marriages can be greatly reduced when cohabitation occurs.

Moreover, people often think cohabiting is exciting at the beginning but gets less and less exciting or boring, and this complicates the whole process because one may later find out that they do not want to spend the rest of their lives with the other person.

But isn’t this discovery a good one in that it nips in the bud the possibility of divorce later?

Knowing that marriage may get boring after some years tells us that marriage takes deliberate effort and commitment to make it work.

Many friendships cannot survive the intricacies of cohabitation. They are best of friends until they start living together, then the problems begin to surface and they lead to bigger issues which sabotage their bond. This same principle applies to relationships, too.

Whether one approves of cohabitation or not is a personal decision; however, cohabitation can reveal some fundamental flaws or inadequacies in one’s partner, one then has a choice to make whether one is going to spend the rest of one’s life with this person.