tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16201378.post2624451496754064475..comments2023-12-28T18:17:11.191-05:00Comments on Gruntled Center: Two Cheers for a Lower Divorce RateGruntledhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14377809238377382438noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16201378.post-5225945190751287242007-05-12T12:33:00.000-04:002007-05-12T12:33:00.000-04:00The research that Waite and Gallagher report in Th...The research that Waite and Gallagher report in The Case for Marriage does include a number of controls to see if the higher cohabiters' divorce rate is due to cohabitation or selection effects of the kind of people who cohabit. They are convinced that the effect comes mostly from the cohabitation. This makes sense to me, because much of the power of marriage comes from the permanent public commitment, which leads married people to invest in the relationship more than cohabiters do.Gruntledhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14377809238377382438noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16201378.post-31219746641022304832007-05-12T08:14:00.000-04:002007-05-12T08:14:00.000-04:00elizabeth,This sounds like sophistry.Taking your a...elizabeth,<BR/>This sounds like sophistry.<BR/>Taking your argument no one could really prove anything. If a person ran up and stabbed someone in the heart multiple times would you argue that just because he died just after being stabbed it doesn't follow that the stabber killed him?(Correlation does not imply causation, and all that.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16201378.post-7632457580001105022007-05-11T23:52:00.000-04:002007-05-11T23:52:00.000-04:00I'm no expert, but from what I have read it sounds...I'm no expert, but from what I have read it sounds like although studies have shown that cohabiting couples have higher divorce rates, nobody has proven that they have higher divorce rates BECAUSE they cohabited. (Correlation does not imply causation, and all that.) It may be that the type of people who consider cohabitation as an option are also just more likely to consider divorce as an option. If that is true, then telling would-be cohabiters not to cohabit doesn't seem like it would go very far towards lowering the divorce rate. <BR/><BR/>Instead of "educating cohabiters about what their real odds of happiness are" (which sounds awfully smug and judgmental), maybe educating ALL couples about careful partner selection, effective communication, relationship skills, etc. is more in order. <BR/><BR/>Also in order: looking at happiness rates, not divorce rates, as a measure of marriage success. <BR/><BR/>If anybody really has convincingly shown that cohabiters have a higher divorce rate specifically because they lived together, I would be interested to know about it.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18257327128060999486noreply@blogger.com