By KATIE PARKER
A study released from the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University last week supports The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ view on marriage.
The decade of research from the marriage project indicates that individuals who live together before marriage have a higher divorce rate than other couples.
“Studies like these have been done for the last 30 years, and they all show the same thing,” said Douglas E. Brinley, a BYU religion professor and marriage counselor.
According to the Associated Press, a 1997 study by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that 27 percent of females who lived with someone before committing to marriage ended up divorced within five years.
Figures form the National Survey of Families and Households in 1992 revealed that 46 percent of couples who lived together before wed-lock, were likely to see their belated marriages dissolved.
Brinley says living together strips single men and women of commitment and faith in the act of marriage.
“These single couples only want the physical relationship without the commitment of marriage and children,” Brinley said.
In the May Ensign of 1981, President Boyd K. Packer, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for the LDS Church, said that virtue, self-esteem, and refinement of character wither away.
He said that living together without lawfully being wed destroys something within all participants.
“To suppose that one day they may nonchalantly change their habits and immediately claim all that might have been theirs had they not made a mockery of marriage is to suppose something that will not be,” President Packer said.
President Packer described marriage as sacred, and he warned LDS Church members to run from anything that pretends to be marriage.
“Even a rickety marriage will serve good purpose as long as two people struggle to keep it from falling down around them,” he said.
The Proclamation on the Family released by the LDS Church in September 1995 says the marriage of a man and woman is ordained of God and the fundamental unit of society.
“The sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife,” it says.
