WHAT WOULD YOU SAY: Is Marriage Really Just a Piece of Paper?
(6:20 VIEWING) — It’s a commonplace these days to hear people claim they aren’t getting married and are instead simply living together because doing the latter is a good way to “check compatibility” or “marriage is nothing more than a legal piece of paper.”
Is that true? It is certainly a widely held belief, but the research — to say nothing of common sense and eons of human experience — point in the exact opposite direction, and strongly so.
Here’s how to doom your marriage before it begins.
Just to cite one example, research conducted for the National Marriage Project, “married adults are much more likely than cohabiting adults to report being satisfied with their relationship.”
Even after controlling for multiple factors such as age and educational level differences, a healthy majority of married women said they were happy.
In the following 6:20 video from the Colson Center’s fine “What Would You Say?” series of productions on contemporary issues, much more such evidence is presented that taken together provides a compelling case for making the life-long commitment instead of merely putting your toe in water: