How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science of Finding Love

by Logan Ury

Married couples who move in together before they get married tend to be less satisfied and more likely to divorce than those who don’t. This association is known as the cohabitation effect.

What does the tale of Ethan and Jamie teach us? First, cohabitation can lead to marriages (and subsequent divorces) that wouldn’t have occurred if the couple hadn’t moved in together.

Moving in together makes it harder to be honest with yourself about the quality of the relationship because the cost of separating goes up significantly. Yet again, we encounter the status quo bias, our tendency to leave things as they are. When you break up with someone you live with, you’re not just changing your relationship status, you’re also upending your housing situation and your daily routines. This makes the status quo bias even harder to overcome. If

If you want to be in a long-term relationship, eventually you have to commit to someone and give it a try.

sunk-cost fallacy. It’s the feeling that once you invest in something, you should see it through.

“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”

Couples who wait one to two years before getting engaged are 20 percent less likely to get divorced than those who wait under a year before putting a ring on it. Couples who wait at least three years before engagement are 39 percent less likely to get divorced than those who get engaged before a year.

Even if you wait a few years, love can still obscure your priorities. When I interviewed a series of divorce lawyers (a bit of an awkward hobby to explain to Scott), several said that couples often make the same big mistake when considering marriage. They’re so fond of each other that they assume the other person wants the same things in life; therefore, they don’t set aside the time to talk explicitly about major decisions like where to live or if they want children.

married. Enter the divorce lawyer. This optimistic assumption that you and your partner want the same thing makes sense, by the way. We’re led astray by the false-consensus effect—a tendency to assume that the majority of others agree with our own values, beliefs, and behaviors.