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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
July 9, 2013

 PUT HIM DOWN AS ‘UNCOMMITED’
A new study suggests cohabitation is a bad bargain for women.
By
JAMES TARANTO

Another new study confirms that men and women are different–specifically, that cohabitation seems to be a bad bargain for women. At The Atlantic’s website, sociologist Brad Wilcox has a summary of the report, produced for the RAND Corp. by Michael Pollard and Kathleen Harris, also sociologists. Here’s the central finding:
Pollard and Harris found that the majority of cohabiting young men do not endorse the maximum indicator of relationship permanence: 52 percent of cohabiting men between ages 18 and 26 are not “almost certain” that their relationship is permanent. Moreover, a large minority (41 percent) of men report that they are not “completely committed” to their live-in girlfriends. By contrast, only 39 percent of cohabiting women in the same age group are not “almost certain” their relationship will go the distance, and only 26 percent say they are not “completely committed.”

For married couples, by contrast, there’s no commitment gap: Only 19% of men and 19% of women were less than “almost certain” their relationships would be permanent.

It’s almost tautological that married couples tend to be more committed than unmarried ones, but the commitment gap among the latter group points to a disequilibrium in the romantic marketplace. No doubt there are cohabiting couples in which both partners are strongly committed, in which neither partner is, and in which he is but she isn’t. But the tendency is for women to be more committed than men, which suggests that many women settle for cohabitation when they would prefer marriage.

Wilcox tells a story of a pseudonymous friend, “Shannon,” who fits the stereotype: She moved in with a boyfriend at 28. As the years passed, he “turned aside her queries about their shared future–queries that started off subtle and became more explicit as the years passed by. Finally, when she turned 33, Shannon told him she wanted a wedding date, to which he responded that he was not ready for marriage.” Whereupon she dumped him.

If it were 50 years earlier and “living in sin” were still frowned upon, Shannon would have had the leverage to insist on marriage much earlier–or, if the boyfriend proved unwilling, the impetus to move on. The option of cohabitation tends to give men the upper hand in relationships. Even though it was Shannon who dumped her boyfriend, he manifestly had the stronger position.

Why would men be less committal? Because, as we’ve often noted, the sexes have inherited different reproductive strategies through the evolutionary process. And even if a man and a woman are equally interested in having children, it is a matter of greater urgency for her because of the biological clock. “I froze my eggs last week as a backup plan,” Carolyn Moos tells Cosmopolitan. “It’s an empowering option.” Moos, 35, saw her marital hopes disintegrate when ex-fiancé Jason Collins, a professional basketball player she’d dated for eight years, announced that he was gay.

In case you were wondering what Moos saw in Collins, here’s the answer: “He was intelligent, good-humored, handsome, and importantly, taller than I am–7 feet. (I’m 6 feet 5 and a former pro basketball player myself.)” Even Cosmo readers can’t avoid the reality of female hypergamy.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports on another new study of relationships–this one showing that women “are closing the gap” with men “on at least one measure: cheating on their spouses”:

The percentage of wives having affairs rose almost 40 percent during the last two decades to 14.7 percent in 2010, while the number of men admitting to extramarital affairs held constant at 21 percent, according to the latest data from the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey.

The narrowing gap, reported by a sociologist at Auburn University at Montgomery, reflects multiple trends. Wives with their own jobs have less to lose economically from a divorce, and social media have made it easier to engage in affairs.

We’d suggest there may be an additional factor at play: the increase in cohabitation, which profoundly affects who ends up getting married.
If cohabitation is better suited to male sexuality and marriage to female sexuality, as the Rand study suggests, then one would expect the most attractive men–those with the widest options–to be most able to exercise their preference for the former. The corollary would be that married men would be less attractive–and their wives less happy and likelier to stray.