The High Price of Divorce

Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. Galatians 6:7

Harriet McManus discounted the notion that couples can go through a "trial marriage."

"It's really more like a trial divorce," she said at a press conference at the Family Research Council. "The only question is whether you break up before the wedding or after the wedding in a legal divorce. As one of our marriage educator friends says, you can't practice permanence. Of 100 cohabiting couples, 85 break up before or after the wedding, leaving only 15 couples in a lasting marriage after 10 years, and who knows how many more divorces after 10 years.

Women who cohabitate are more likely to be abused and to be depressed than women in a marriage, studies cited by the McManuses say. Additionally, men and women in a live-together arrangement are more likely to cheat on one another. But perhaps most concerning, couples who cohabitate are nearly just as likely as married couples to have children - meaning that the failed relationship has an impact beyond the man and woman.

"The children feel abandoned when one parent moves out," Harriet McManus said. "That causes a great deal of trauma for the children, tripling the odds that the child will be expelled from school, compared to those raised in an intact family."

Couples who believe they can save money by cohabitating must weigh not only the biblical commandment against it, but the likely negative consequences of their decision, the McManuses say. Such couples should instead look for same-sex roommates as a money-saver, they added.

Often couple cohabitate because they rarely have seen a successful marriage up close, Mike McManus said.

"The major underlying reason for soaring cohabitation is that these are couples in which one or both partners grew up in a divorced home or in a home where there was not a marriage," he said. "These young couples fear marriage because they fear divorce."

Churches should mentor engaged couples as a way to strengthen relationships, stop cohabitation and prevent divorces, the McManuses believe. Statistics back them up. Of 288 couples who were mentored at their church between 1992 and 2000, only seven divorced or separated. Fifty-five of the couples, 19%, broke up before marrying.

"That's a huge percentage- that's 19 percent," Mike McManus said of the break-ups. "You need to have the mentoring process be rigorous enough that the weak relationships either break up on their own or get better and get stronger."