Many college students and recent graduates slide into cohabitation, and some don't see that as a crucial problem. The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) recently issued a report asserting "a 65 percent chance that first cohabitation for men and women would transition to marriage within 5 years." The report claimed that the "probability that a woman's marriage would last at least 10 years" was nearly the same for those who first cohabited (60 percent) as for those "who did not cohabit before marriage (66 percent)."
Those statistics bulwark three widespread myths of cohabitation, but I analyze the data differently:
Myth 1: Cohabitation is a step to marriage. The number of cohabiting couples soared 13-fold from 523,000 in 1970 to 6.8 million in 2008—but only 1.4 million of them married that year. The average cohabitation lasts 18 months, which means there are about 4.6 million new...