I talk regularly with casualties of cohabitation. Kathy, a cute high school sophomore, confided in me after an all-school assembly that she loved the abstinence message and wanted to embrace secondary virginity. She thought it was a great idea and she hoped to find an example of a good marriage. Her parents were high school sweethearts but never got married. She and her sister had only seen their biological dad twice.

She told me, “I really want to share this message with my mom, but I don’t think her boyfriend is going to like it.”

“Who cares what he thinks,” I challenged her. “She has to do what’s best for her and her children.”

“You’re right,” she said, “but her boyfriend lives with us and he’s kind of abusive.”
At this point I thought to myself, Here we go again . . . same story, different girl. As we talked further, she began to reveal the dark secrets of her life, which unfortunately fit perfectly into the statistical profile of a child of cohabitation.

Cohabiting women are more likely than married women to be the victims of physical and/or sexual abuse.

This young woman and her sister were both molested by one of her mom’s previous live-in boyfriends, and when her sister told the mother, she didn’t do anything about it. Some women think that living with someone will help in the raising of their children, but cohabitation increases the chances that a child—male or female—will be abused. Boyfriends are disproportionately likely to sexually or physically abuse their girlfriend’s children. In fact, the most unsafe family environment for children is when the mother is living with someone other than the child’s biological father.¹⁵

The abuse, as you can imagine, heaped a great amount of emotional distress on both this young woman and her sister. She told me that she wanted to go to college, but her mom didn’t have the money. She didn’t know where her father was, and she had no right to support from any of her mother’s previous “partners” who were not her biological father. She and her sister paid the economic price for her mother’s life.

“Your grades aren’t that good, are they?” I asked.

“How did you know?” she responded with surprise.

I knew because it’s the same sad story I’ve heard too many times to count. This girl wasn’t getting low grades because she wasn’t bright, but because she was experimenting with alcohol and sex to emotionally escape her situation at home. She seemed very bright and extremely mature for her age, but her mother’s poor decisions had caused her to have behavioral problems and lower academic performance than children in married families.

Next up, why marriage is the best alternative. …

⁶Jeffry Larson, Should We Stay Together? A Scientifically Proven Method for Evaluating Your Relationship and Improving Its Chances for Long-term Success (San Francisc  Jossey-Bass, 2000), note 5. For additional information, visit http://marriageandfamilies.byu.edu/issues/2001/January/cohabitation.aspx.
⁷David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation Before Marriage: A Comprehensive Review of Recent Research.”  http://marriage.rutgers.edu/Publications/Print/PrintSWLT.htm (accessed December 2006).
⁸Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially (New York: Doubleday Books, 2000).
⁹Ibid.
¹⁰Ibid.
¹¹Ibid.
¹²Linda J. Waite and K. Joyner, “Emotional and Physical Satisfaction in Married, Cohabiting and Dating Sexual Unions: Do Men and Women Differ?” cited in E.O. Laumann and R. Michael, eds. Studies in Sex (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1994).
¹³David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, Should We Live Together?  What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation Before Marriage (New Brunswick, NJ: The National Marriage Project, 1999), note 4.
¹⁴Waite and Gallagher, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially, p.41, note 6.
¹⁵R. Whelan, Broken Homes and Battered Children: A Study of the Relationship Between Child Abuse and Family Type (London: Family Education Trust, 1993).
 

From The Naked Truth, © 2007 by Lakita Garth. Published by Regal Books, www.regalbooks.com. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Lakita Garth is a social commentator, media consultant and professional entertainer in Los Angeles. As a highly sought-after abstinence speaker, she has talked with millions of teenagers through motivational assemblies across the United States and internationally. She has also testified before the U.S. Surgeon General and the U.S. Senate on teen pregnancy prevention, and serves on the executive board of The National Abstinence Clearinghouse. Garth, a runner-up to Miss Black America, has appeared in numerous commercials and television shows, including MTV and BET.