Stephanie Coontz, the director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, offered a defense of same-sex marriage which appeared in a Dallas Morning News editorial. The article, The Heterosexual Revolution argues that it is not the legitimization of "gay marriage" that threatens "traditional" marriage but rather it was the earlier abandonment of marriage and all that it embodies by heterosexuals that destroyed our traditional commitment to marriage.

In this latter sense I could not agree more. The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s succeeded in extending sex beyond the previously exclusive relationship of legal marriage. For the first time in America sex outside of marriage became increasingly accepted. As a result sex was divorced from marriage which then opened the door to the acceptance of out-of-wedlock child-bearing further eroding the socially-perceived necessity of marriage. With the increased separation of sex from marriage and marriage from parenting; marriage simply became unnecessary and outdated in the minds of many.

Indeed, today 35 percent of children born in the U.S. are born out-of-wedlock. Sixty-percent of these are to single, non-cohabitating mothers. Out-of wedlock birth has surpassed divorce has the leading cause of single-parenthood in America. However the number of children born to non-married cohabitating couples has increased steadily over the last decade. While statistics demonstrate a continual decrease in the rate of divorce since its peak in 1980 this is largely due to a corresponding reduction in the number of couples marrying. No marriage - no divorce. Conversely non-married cohabitation increased 1200 percent from 1960 to 2004. Today, over half of all first marriages are now preceded by living together, compared to virtually none 50 years ago.

For many, cohabitation is seen as a prelude to marriage and for a growing number of couples, it is considered an acceptable alternative to marriage with a growing percentage of these cohabiting households, now over 40 percent, containing children. The belief that living together before marriage is a useful way "to find out whether you really get along" and thus avoid a bad marriage and an eventual divorce, is now widespread among young people. But the available data on the effects of cohabitation fail to confirm this belief. In fact, a substantial body of evidence indicates that those who live together before marriage are more likely to break up after marriage. The most recent research reveals that 50 percent of cohabitating relationships break up by the fifth year as compared to a 15 percent dissolution rate among married couples.

I would add that cohabitation undermines the very heart of a successful relationship and subsequent marriage by fostering a condition in which couples begin with a "reserved" level of commitment to one another. This is the essence of a successful marriage; decreased commitment to "me" replaced by a mutual commitment to "we." In a cohabitating relationship couples still hold, in varying degrees, to their individualism, their wants, their needs, etc. This might explain in part why these relationships experience considerably higher break up rates.