Are cohabiting Catholics always "living in sin"? Two respected family ministry researchers argue "no" and suggest the recovery of an ancient ritual for those moving toward marriage.

Consider two unmarried couples who are living together. The first couple, 25-year-old Tom and 23-year-old Sharon, have no plans to marry. He lived with two previous girlfriends, while she lived with her ex-husband before they married, which was just before their first child was born. The second couple, 28-year-old Frank and 24-year-old Molly, are engaged to be married. They are living together for six months while engaged.

Many Catholics believe living together before marriage is "living in sin" and associate premarital cohabitation with an increased divorce rate, but recent research reports a more detailed picture of the relationship between cohabitation and marital instability.

If the first couple, Tom and Sharon, were to get married, they would be at far greater risk for marital instability than the second couple, Frank and Molly. Couples who live together with no definite plan to marry are in a completely different situation from cohabiting couples already committed to marrying one another. Those already committed to one another and planning to marry look and act like already-married couples in most ways. For committed cohabiting couples, living together is a step on the path to marriage; for couples who are not committed, cohabitation is a social arrangement inferior to marriage.

The sharp increase in premarital cohabitation is one of the most fundamental social changes in Western countries today. Between 1960 and 2004, the number of unmarried couples living together in the United States increased tenfold from less than 500,000 to more than 5 million. Cohabitation has become, even for Catholics, more and more a conventional and socially endorsed reality.

Recent focus groups of young Catholic adults on "problematic aspects of church teaching" found that they disagreed with church teaching on premarital sex and cohabitation and do not see a fundamental difference in a loving relationship before and after a wedding. Our experience with young adults leads us to doubt the claim that they are living in sin. It would appear closer to the truth that they are growing, perhaps slowly but nonetheless surely, into grace.

The most recent and respected marriage research identifies two kinds of cohabitors: those who are not committed to marriage, whom we name "non-nuptial cohabitors," and those already committed to marriage, perhaps even engaged, whom we name "nuptial cohabitors."

Although only non-nuptial cohabitation is linked to an increased likelihood of divorce after marriage, the fact that many Catholics believe otherwise leaves current pastoral responses to cohabiting couples both uninformed and outdated. It also raises questions about church documents based on old research and the pastoral approaches they recommend. Church documents continue to lump all cohabitors together, focus narrowly on the sexual dimension of relationships, and ignore the variety and complexity of the intentions, situations, and meanings couples give to cohabitation and its morality.

Given the current research that demonstrates that not all cohabitors are alike, we propose the re-introduction of an ancient ritual of betrothal for nuptial cohabitors, followed by intensive marriage preparation in the Catholic pastoral tradition.


Committed for life
In his 1981 encyclical Familiaris Consortio (On the Family), Pope John Paul II taught that conjugal love "aims at a deeply personal unity, the unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul; it demands indissolubility and faithfulness in definitive mutual giving; and it is open to fertility." This describes the commitment not only of married spouses but also of nuptial cohabitors who have definitively committed to a loving relationship with one another but who have not yet celebrated their wedding. They come to the church to be married precisely to celebrate the gift of their love for each other and to give it a religious, sacramental permanence.

We define commitment as a freely chosen and faithful devotion to a person. Applied to relationships, including marriage, commitment as dedication is twofold: commitment to the partner and commitment to the relationship. Commitment to the partner entails those characteristics John Paul lists or implies, namely love, fidelity, loyalty, and fortitude in the trials and messiness of the relationship. Commitment to the relationship entails exclusivity, indissolubility, and fertility as fruitfulness.

Couples who share this double commitment manifest it in various ways, including a strong couple identity, a strong sense of "us" and "we," the maintenance of their partner and their marriage as a high priority, a protection of their relationship against attraction to others, a readiness to sacrifice for one another without resentment, and an investment of themselves personally in building a future together. Such double commitment is the surest path to marital intimacy.

Couples with such double commitment reveal their deepest desires, failings, and hurts to one another. They do not think about possible alternatives to their partner, and they are satisfied with their relationship in general and their sex life in particular. They are willing to give up things important to them for the sake of their relationship, and they report higher levels of happiness and stability than do couples who do not regularly sacrifice for the sake of their relationship. These happy couples have a strong sense of their future together and they are more likely to speak of that future than of their past conflicts, failures, and disappointments.

It is such commitment, we suggest, that nuptial cohabitors exhibit, albeit in seed at the beginning of their cohabitation but in full flower when they come to the church to be married. It is precisely the seedling love and commitment becoming flower that needs to be ritually celebrated and realized in the betrothal.