Item from the Smart Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics Collection

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The Age - Australia

Cohabitors: The new breed By BETTINA ARNDT Tuesday 7 December 1999

OPEN any newspaper and you'll see them. The football hero proudly nursing
his newborn baby. Beside him is his partner, the child's mother. At the
opening of a kindergarten, a young defacto couple are playing with their
toddler. Cohabiting parents are so commonplace that their unmarried
status no longer attracts comment.

Twenty years ago it was different. Then, many were shocked at the trend
for couples to live together, even though the defacto relationship was
often seen as a youthful experiment in trial marriage, mere practice for
the real thing. Today almost 60per cent of couples live together before
marriage, even more do so post-divorce, and cohabitation has become a
long-term lifestyle choice.

Many take this one step further, seeing the defacto relationship as a
suitable setting for raising children. But the instability of many
defacto relationships must raise concerns that this trend is adding to
the number of children having to cope with family break-ups. Many such
children end up living, often in poverty, with their single mothers or
with new defacto fathers.

The social stigma for the children has, however, virtually disappeared.
Every fourth baby born in Australia has unmarried parents. In 1997, there
were 168,600 children whose biological parents were living in a defacto
relationship. Defacto couples are surprised to be asked whether they have
been criticised for bearing ex-nuptial children.

"Of course not. I'm not around people who'd criticise me for my lifestyle
choice. There are no repressed Catholics in my life," says John Nielsen,
38, partner to Monica Schmidt, 29, mother of his two youngest children,
Karla, 19 months, and Freyja, three months. Nielsen has a 15-year-old-son
from an earlier marriage and an 11-year-old boy from another defacto
relationship.

When Karla was born, Schmidt's mother suggested the couple should marry
to avoid the child being embarrassed at school. Monica was scathing:
"Mum, these are the '90s!" She explained that, since the child would most
likely be surrounded by children born to single mothers, having unmarried
parents was no big deal. They see no reason to marry.

"It's just a piece of paper to me. I consider myself married without
that," says Schmidt.

Well, almost married. She sees the defacto state as preferable.

"There's more freedom, I'm allowed to do whatever I like," she says,
reacting against the compulsory togetherness she associates with
matrimony.

"It's outmoded. I'm just as committed to the relationship as I would be
if I was married," adds Nielsen.

But this commitment has its limits. Nielsen has a troubled background and
claims to have been emotionally abused after his parents' divorce. He is
heavily involved in therapy and says that if the relationship with
Schmidt interfered with his therapeutic progress, he'd leave.

And what about the children? "Anything that comes before my recovery has
to go," Nielsen says. "If I'm not putting myself first, the children are
not going to see someone who's looking after themselves. It's better to
remove them from that situation."

Schmidt is equally ready to split if the relationship goes downhill. "I
know if the relationship gets too bad, it would hurt the kids more to
stay."

In recent years there has been a flurry of research into cohabiting
couples following the discovery that, contrary to many assumptions, trial
marriages decrease rather than increase marital stability. Not only do
defacto unions break up at roughly twice the rate of married couples, but
defacto couples are more divorce-prone when they do marry.

Helen Glezer's 1991 research at the Australian Institute of Family
Studies showed that 25per cent of defacto relationships lasted 12 months,
about half ended after two years and three-quarters ended by four years.
And then there's the AIFS Family Formation Project, which found that
after five years of marriage 13per cent of those who had previously
cohabited were divorced, compared with 6per cent of non-cohabiters. After
20 years, the corresponding figures were 56per cent and 27per cent.

And there is little evidence of greater stability when children are
involved. Negotiating the Life Course, a study by Australian National
University demography professor Peter McDonald, found many defacto
couples have complex relationship histories, involving very unstable
relationships.

Recent research from Britain's Economic and Social Research Council shows
families with cohabiting parents break up at four times the rate of
married parents.

Couples who choose to cohabit are also likely to hold attitudes that make
them more prone to divorce. Glezer found that the couples most likely to
live together usually have fewer traditional values and place more
emphasis on personal autonomy.

"I've got a life too. If I thought `oh, this isn't doing anything for
me', I'd move on," says Robyn Hill, 41, who lives with Tony Lawes, 47,
and their two children in Yallourn North. She was married for five years
in her 20s - "we worked out it just wasn't happening" - and fell pregnant
just after she and Lawes began living together. "About 10 minutes after,"
chuckles Hill.

She decided that if Lawes wasn't interested in the child she'd go ahead
on her own, but he was thrilled to become a father. "The child just sort
of happened. It brought the issue to a head and we said `oh well, all
right."'

Their second child followed 15 months later. Hill jokes that she has
considered the advantages of a wedding. "I thought `well, we do need a
new toaster!' But I can't see the need to be married."

Sotirios Sarantakos, a professor of sociology at Charles Sturt
University, believes the unstable relationship history of cohabiting
couples is partly because of the particular group attracted to the
lifestyle - people who are less likely to value commitment to a permanent
relationship. His research shows many couples choose cohabitation because
they see the relationship as different to marriage. "They see
cohabitation as involving less commitment, less responsibility, more
freedom, an easy exit, a more liberal, independent type of relationship."

He has also found that many choose to live with people they would reject
as marriage partners. "They accept different qualities in a defacto
partner than they would choose in a spouse."

It's hardly surprising then that when these relationships drift into
marriage many come unstuck. And equally, when an unplanned pregnancy
occurs in a defacto relationship, a woman may end up with a very
different father for her children than the man she might have chosen for
the job.

Talking to women in defacto relationships, it's striking how many decide
to go ahead with the pregnancy, despite being in an unsatisfactory
relationship.

"Our relationship was quite rocky ... but I was under the delusion that
I'd have the child and everything would be fine and dandy. But things
went from bad to worse," says Suzi Malivanek, who works as a waitress in
Mullumbimby, NSW, to support her 14-year-old daughter.

Her defacto relationship broke up more than 11 years ago. At that time
she did not consider marriage an option, but now says: "I would love to
be married and have a committed relationship."

She has decided to move away from the NSW North Coast culture, believing
it contributes to relationship instability. "Up here there are a lot of
women who have so many children to different fathers - people going from
partner to partner - and I see a lot of devastating effects on their
kids. The things we do to our kids, I just can't believe it."

The high concentration of defacto couples in such communities contributes
to relationship instability, says Sarantakos. But he points out that the
other main group bearing children in defacto relationships are hard-up
young people. "Many poor, unemployed kids don't feel they are in a
position to get married. They drift into relationships, often end up
having a child, and then move on."

AIFS research has found couples bearing children in defacto relationships
are usually from poorer socio-economic backgrounds. In 40per cent of
defacto couples with children, both partners had fewer than 10 years of
school, compared with 9per cent of married couples with children, says
research by McDonald and Siew-Ean Khoo. McDonald's recent study found
that more than half the women having ex-nuptial births were under 25.

Being born into often unstable defacto relationships means most of these
children will end up being raised in poverty by poor, young, single
mothers or will become involved in stepfamilies, which increase the risks
for the children.

But there are exceptions. Many middle-class, educated parents choose not
to marry but maintain long-term stable families. Like Peter Howard, 45, a
Sydney retail manager who has been with his partner, Lyn Harrison, 42,
for 15 years. They have an eight-year-old daughter.

"We've thought about getting married, but just never got around to it,"
he says, explaining that he sees their daughter as proof of their
commitment. "The decision to have a child (is) definitely a tie. I
wouldn't think of walking away from it now any more than if we were
married."

Among the ageing baby boomers are many who saw marriage as an antiquated,
bourgeois institution - yet they may also speak very eloquently about
commitment. Like a Sydney doctor I spoke to who has lived with his
partner for 20 years. They have two children.

"I don't see any difference between marriage and non-marriage in terms of
the casualisation of relationships," he says. "I think people breaking up
relationships involving young children is a very serious issue and I'd
like to see a lot more responsibility from parents, but marriage has
nothing to do with it."

That is true for some. But the evidence does suggest attitudes associated
with cohabitation may be contributing to the casualisation of
relationships, particularly in certain sectors of our society. Among the
growing group of defacto parents are many who acknowledge they are
resisting the further ties they associate with marriage and who baulk at
loss of freedom, the absence of an escape hatch. To have children in
these circumstances is surely cause for concern.

Children today are more likely to be living with a parent who is in a
defacto relationship after divorce rather than before. Defacto couples
tend to be divorcees rather than young never-marrieds. There is a strong
trend for divorced parents, at least initially, to live with their new
partners rather than marry them. McDonald's research shows more than
80per cent of remarried couples have lived with each other.

This means many Australian children spend time living with a divorced
parent and a defacto partner. Glezer's Family Life Course study found
that of cohabiting couples with children, about six out of 10 were living
in a stepfamily. So, almost two-thirds of the children living with
defacto parents have experienced parental divorce and live with a defacto
step-parent.

In 1996, 279,000 children lived with parents in a defacto relationship,
twice as many as a decade earlier. Sadly, there is growing evidence that
these children face a dramatically increased risk of physical and sexual
abuse.

The NSW Child Protection Council has warned that defacto partners pose a
disproportionate risk to children - 1994 child homicide figures show the
proportion of suspected killers in defacto relationships was
six-and-a-half times higher than in the general population. A study by
Robert Whelan of Britain's Family Education Trust found that, compared
with children living with married biological parents, children living
with unmarried biological parents are 20 times more likely to be subject
to child abuse. Those living with a mother and a defacto boyfriend are 33
times more at risk.

Many of these defacto relationships don't last, and the children find
themselves caught up in not just one family break-up but a series of such
disruptions. There is strong evidence that change - swapping schools,
moving house, new neighborhoods, new family members - most affects
children's post-divorce wellbeing.

The large numbers of children of divorce caught up in these often
temporary defacto relationships even have their school progress hampered,
says Sarantakos. Even after allowing for socio-economic circumstances, he
finds children of cohabiting couples perform significantly worse than
children of married couples in measures of aptitude like language and
mathematics, and are more likely to fall below their expected level of
educational achievement.

Obviously there are exceptions. Many divorced parents are extremely
cautious about involving their children in their love lives, and many
achieve very stable relationships, with or without a remarriage. But far
too many are falling into trial relationships and taking children along
for the ride.

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