I think your boyfriend would answer, "Only if you want to be engaged to the mild sauce." =)
I lived with my fiance for about 2 years before he asked me to marry him. (During a very serious conversation that had nothing to do with love, marriage or happiness) But like you and your beau, we always felt married from the moment my son and I moved in with him. I don't believe those statistics about living together but I do believe that it is a great way to truly see if you would like to continue being with someone for a long amount of time. Nothing like a little bit of space sharing to bring out the true colors of someone. Good luck and congratulations, I think...

I live with my boyfriend now. It is our first year together although we've been together for the better part of 8 years so I guess its about time LOL! I really wouldn't have it any other way. We've learned so much about each other and how to truly have a partnership and isn't that what marriage is all about? Besides, those statistics are misleading. If my undergraduate work in psychology taught me anything it was that correlation does not equal causation. Think of all the reasons why people move in together: someone gets kicked out of their apartment or gets stuck with a crappy roommate, one person cheats and the other person wants to keep a closer eye on them and so on and so on. Those people might end up deciding to get married (since it seems like the natural step after moving in) but their marriage fails because of their relationship, not because they lived together.

So I'd say that two people moving in together because they are working towards the next level of their relationship probably won't lead to divorce (jeez I hope not!). Congrats to you and the hot sauce.

First, this reminds of the scene in Singles where the guy says to the girl, "Just take another bite of that chili dog if the answer is 'Yes.'" Ha!

In seriousness, I lived with a boyfriend for 2 out of the 4 years we were together. He never proposed. That's the tricky thing about cohabitation - it can mean one thing to one person (we're on the road to marriage) and something completely different to the other (we're saving money and hanging out).

I used to say after we broke up that I would never do it again. A break-up is hard enough without calling the movers. But then, I began to think, I'm four years older than I was when I made that decision. I was young, and perhaps now I know a little bit more about communication than I did then.

As to society looking down on it... well, they'll get over it. Their kids are having children out of wedlock, while they probably just made it under the rope with a shotgun wedding in their day. I think it's whatever works for you.

And I would wait for a ring. ;)

I don't think there is anything wrong with living together before marriage. I know that the studies that have been done on this have proven that couples who cohabitate are more likely to divorce, but I think one of the reasons is because they are more liberal and progressive, therefore, more open to divorce. Good luck.

My boyfriend and I moved in with eachother after being together for 2.5 years. We then had to live apart for a year for work, and then are now back together.

For us, we are too young to think seriously about marriage but we know it's down the road. Right now, being together and enjoying our twenties is what we are ready for, in addition to having a dog and buying a condo. For whatever reason we felt our relationship was most organic in this sort of out-of-order order, and I think that's okay.

Today, with money, higher education, and the way we switch jobs/careers/cities, I think it's only natural that we move toward different ways of doing things.

Nicole gets it - both parties have got to be financially independent. That's critical. It's also important to notice how different your styles are before moving in. I'm more big picture, my spouse is exceedingly detailed - it works, but we both do a lot of smoothing that goes on to get there.

Exactly which psychological literature are you drawing this from? You don't explicitly say so, but you seem to cite the statistics as a causal relationship between cohabitation and different features of the traditionally-defined success of marriages. Conducting a study that could actually draw that conclusion would be very difficult: you'd have to find a large sample of non-married couples, and randomly make some of them live together before marriage (without having any idea who's planning to marry or not) and some of them not, then track those couples for as long as they last, or even longer. I will be very impressed if anyone has accomplished this and gathered meaningful data.

More likely, these studies are based on surveys, which only demonstrate correlation — leaving open the possibility (my hunch says probability) that some characteristics that sour relationships also encourage non-marital cohabitation. I have no data to suggest what characteristics to look at, but I hypothesize that a willingness to change personal circumstances to better realign them with changing goals or environments might have something to do with it.

Sometimes I'm curious about those surveys about people who live together before marriage. There have to be other factors that separate them from those who have successful marriages besides JUST having lived together prior to marriage. It seems that it would be much more useful to drill down further into the issues that make marriage unmanagable - in particularly studying those who did live together first, and still made marriage work.

This was so refreshing to read! My boyfriend just asked me to live with him (well, that's misleading - he just asked me but he doesn't want to move in together right away, he just wanted to talk about it in advance) and I have a lot of thoughts spinning around my head right now! I lived with my first partner for seven years and marriage never happened. Looking back, I am glad about that, but at the time it felt like we slid into a routine or habit of just living together and never took our relationship any further. I'm a bit afraid of repeating that mistake.

I find all the statistics disheartening, but as Jeremy pointed out, the numbers mask important information that should be considered as context. I happen to work in the field of Sociology and am pretty familiar with where some of those numbers come from, and they are indeed from correlation studies based on survey/census data. That means that a researcher took one variable (respondent said yes to the question, "did you live with your partner before you got married?") and statistically matched it with another variable (respondent reports having divorced that partner) to see if there's any relationship.

Just because there is one doesn't mean that cohabitation *caused* the divorce. There are many other factors to consider. On a population level, people who cohabit tend to be much younger, tend to have lower education and income levels, and tend to come from backgrounds with greater instability (e.g. families where abuse occurred, people who are not stably employed, people with substance abuse issues or mental health issues, etc.). In other words, lots of people in their very first committed relationship. What you don't know is whether that relationship would have lasted had they not cohabited. Probably not, right? If your life is unstable, you're with your first partner ever, and you haven't worked out your issues, then it probably wouldn't matter whether you never lived together or married, lived together but never married, or didn't live together until marriage - the relationship would still be in jeopardy.

I really hope that made sense. This probably isn't appropriate, but I needed to respond to all the statistics out there (and all the people/places that jump on them and use them out of context) just to get in straight in my own head. And this seemed like the place to just dump it all out.

Thanks for listening - and thanks for posting. For the record, I do not believe marriage proposals count if they are edible. If Duke has any questions, you can tell him that proposal is null and void because, well, it went right through you.