A recent study entitled “Cohabitation Experience and Cohabitation's Association With Marital Dissolution," from authors Michael Rosenfeld and Katharina Roesler, suggests that couples who reside together prior to marriage, are at a higher risk of divorce. The authors of this study call this phenomenon “premarital cohabitation effect.”

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The study harmonized data set of six waves of the retrospective National Surveys of Family Growth, which examined 216,455 couple-years, analyzing them for discrete time-event history methods to predict the risk of divorce. The data examines couple aged 44 years and younger who were in their first marriages in the Unites States from 1970-2015.

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There has been a misnomer that the “premarital cohabitation effect” has declined in the last 10-15 years due to the decline of the social stigma of living together before marriage; however, this most recent study shows that the premarital cohabitation effect is still operative.

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The results of the study show that if a couple does not live together prior to marriage, they have an increased risk of divorce (compared to a couple who lives together prior to marriage) during the first couple of years of the marriage; however, the couple who lived together prior to marriage, has an increased risk of divorce in the long term. This is attributed to the fact that couples who go straight into marriage without living together have a larger immediate shock to living together after marriage, and therefore there is an increased risk of divorce in the short term.

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Keep in mind that the reason for a divorce is always hard to pinpoint and varies from each individual couple to couple. There is no one secret to a great marriage, and there is no one secret to avoiding divorce. Most divorce attorneys will tell you that even after handling hundred of divorces, there is no one singular reason as to why couples get divorced.