Living together, just like marriage, increases lifetime happiness: study

Results of a study recently conducted by the Ohio State University reveal that the lifetime happiness of young couples increases when they live together, similar to when they get married. The results have been published in the journal Family Psychology.

Sara Mernitz is one of the study's co-authors. Mernitz stated that as early as the 1990s, young adults received some emotional benefits from living together.

"Now it appears that young people, especially women, get the same emotional boost from moving in together as they do from going directly to marriage," she said in a statement.

Data was also taken from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. A total of 8,700 individuals born between the years of 1980 and 1984 were interviewed every two years from 2000 to 2010.

Kamp Dush, a fellow researcher and an associate professor at Ohio State, believes that this indicates that the social stigma against living together before getting married has declined over the last few decades. According to Dush, young couples no longer see marriage as the only way to get companionship and social support.

Results vary between different genders. An NDTV report says that men received an emotional boost only when getting married.

The emotional boost is not limited to first relationships. According to a Quartz report, both men and women received an emotional boost, regardless of whether they choose to live together first or go straight into marriage.

"The young people in our study may be selecting better partners for themselves the second time around, which is why they are seeing a drop in emotional distress," Dush said in a statement on NDTV.

There are several limits to the study. For one, the individuals included in the study have not been asked about the quality of their relationship.

Another limitation is that participants were only interviewed twice every year for 10 years. It is possible that the candidates would offer different answers if the test was conducted over a longer period of time.

Even with these limitations, the results reveal that whether a couple chooses marriage or living together, they can still get a happy boost.

According to Lighthouse News Daily, living together is more common these days as it allows couples to test the grounds before marriage and there is no pressure to get married quickly. Being together without being legally tying the knot offers a sense of freedom that is unique to other types of commitments or relationships.