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A Pew Research Center study reports that 77 percent of Americans aged 38 to 43 have cohabited with an unmarried partner. This practice has shifted the median age of first marriage from 24 for men and 21 for women in 1975 to 31 and 28 today, while the share of married adults has fallen from roughly 70 percent to about half.
The change did not arise from neutral social drift. Modern culture actively promotes cohabitation as a low-cost trial period that severs the historic link between courtship, public vows, and shared life under one roof.
In the 1960s the typical couple still met, married, and moved in together within three years. Living together without vows was rare precisely because the older order treated marriage as the public, binding act that established a new household before God and neighbor.
That order traces its strength to the Reformation recovery of marriage as a covenant estate rather than a mere contract or sacrament administered solely by the church. Puritans in particular bound household formation to early marriage, rigorous accountability, and the conviction that the family is the first unit of both church and commonwealth.
Cohabitation dismantles this structure by substituting private experimentation for public covenant. It trains young adults to treat commitment as provisional and children as optional accessories to adult fulfillment.
The governing principle remains unchanged: marriage is the God-ordained foundation of stable households, and any custom that delays or replaces it weakens the entire social order that rests upon those households.
The faithful remnant therefore cannot accommodate the new timeline. They must recover the older pattern of early, public marriage, reject cohabitation as preparation for anything, and rebuild parishes and communities that make such households economically and spiritually viable again.
