This is how shacking up before marriage could affect your relationship

We were always under the impression that shacking up with someone before you married them was the only way you would know exactly what you were getting yourself in for.

Let's face it, you can never truly know what a person is like until you've seen whether you're compatible in a tiny living quarter.

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We've always thought of it as testing the waters because you really want to know if you can live with your future spouse.

However it appears our way of thinking may be completely wrong, if this study by The Journal of Family Psychology is anything to go by.

The research shows that couples who live together before they tie the knot have a higher risk of divorcing than those who had never lived together.

Researchers believe this is because couples who are already living together feel they "fall into" marriage as it's seen as the next logical step after cohabiting and they're entering into it for all the wrong reasons.

“We think there might be a subset of people who live together before they got engaged who might have decided to get married really based on other things in their relationship, because they were already living together and less because they really wanted and had decided they wanted a future together.”

“We think that some couples who move in together without a clear commitment to marriage may wind up sliding into marriage partly because they are already cohabiting."

They also found that couples may feel added pressure to marry because of a joint lease or ownership of a property.

However the real danger point was couples who move in together to ‘test’ their commitment to each other and end up getting married.

"Perhaps if a person is feeling a need to test the relationship, he or she already knows some important information about how a relationship may go over time," researcher Galena Rhoades of the University of Denver explained.

Moral of the story: don't get married for the sake of it or to test your relationship, as it very well may lead to divorce.

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