Conservative grandmothers across this great nation of ours love to warn their female progeny that if they give "the milk" away "for free," then no one will want to "buy the cow." Often concurrent with this adage is the belief that a solid bloc of statistics show that premarital cohabitation — or "shacking up" or "playing house" or "living in sin," depending on how Catholic your grandma is — will increase divorce risk. But the truth is that for women with a higher than average number of notches on their bedpost, playing house actually lowers divorce risk. And for women with a less colorful sexual history, it's not clear that cohabitation plays a role in failed marriages at all. Take that, grandma!
Read full story