Dr Paul Allen

Marriage and divorce rates in New Zealand (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Marriage and divorce rates expressed as percentages of the Australian population at the time. Based on statistics from the ABS 2008 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Divorce Rates in Sweden 2000- 2010 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) AT 32, one of my clients (I’ll call her Jennifer) had a lavish wine-country wedding. By then, Jennifer and her boyfriend had lived together for more than four years. The event was attended by the couple’s friends, families and two dogs. When Jennifer started therapy with me less than a year later, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married,” she sobbed. Most disheartening to Jennifer was that she’d tried to do everything right. “My parents got married young so, of course, they got divorced. We lived together! How did this happen? Cohabitation in the United States has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past half century. In 19

Image via CrunchBase The belief that living together before marriage helps to avoid divorce is “contradicted by experience,” says a  New York Times Op-Ed  by clinical psychologist Dr. Meg Jay, published this past Saturday. Jay, a specialist in young adult development, professes to be “neither for or against” co-habitation , but offers a searing critique of the practice , which she says is becoming “a norm” among young adults. According to her article, the phenomenon has increased by more than 1500% since 1960, when there were about 450,000 unmarried couples living together. There are now over 7.5 million such couples. Dr. Meg Jay Recent studies have indicated that there is a causal relationship between the rise in divorce that has accompanied the rise in co-habitation, says Jay. In the past, she notes, some researchers have rejected the suggestion that cohabiting can actually cause divorce, attributing the correlation between the two to “selection, or the idea that cohabitors we