I'm passing this on to the ELCA Task Force on Sexuality, just so they know. Turns out that "shacking up" doesn't increase the rate of divorce. From Alas:
Once upon a time, social scientists showed that couples who lived together before marrying, were more likely to divorce than couples who didn’t live together until marrying. This was true in Europe, Canada and the USA.
This surprised a bunch of people, and seemed to disprove the “try it on before you buy it” theory of marriage.
This did, however, greatly please those social conservatives who prefer to go though life in a constant panic, screaming “the marriage rates are falling! The marriage rates are falling!” They felt this proved their theory that sex without God’s blessing introduces some sort of intrinsic rot into marriages and made them more likely failures.
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