Brad and Jacqui Putt have been married nearly 20 years. Their business is Main Stage Music in downtown Dayton, Tenn.When they were 18, Brad Putt proposed to his wife Jacqui on a walking bridge draped in glittering lights and spanning a creek in Dayton, Tenn. They set the date for one year later.
In the lead-up to their nuptials, Brad moved out of his parents' house and into an apartment, and Jacqui moved into his parents' house to take his place.
"We both were raised in Christian households, and we wanted to keep our marriage sanctified and not bring any defilement into our marriage," says Brad, now 39 and still living in Dayton, where he and Jacqui just celebrated their 19th anniversary.
"Romantic cohabitation was not something either of us would have been raised to think was OK," he explains.
Even if it meant having to pay rent on a "roach motel" of an apartment less than a mile from his fiancee, Brad and his wife say they're glad they waited to move in with each other until after the wedding.
"When people are living together before marriage, it's not as exciting," Jacqui says. "You just get married and go back to your everyday lives. [Waiting until afterward] makes it a new chapter in your life. I don't know - I guess you don't take it for granted."
Waiting to live together until after the ceremony was once the accepted premarital norm but, in the last 50 years, fewer and fewer couples have chosen to live separately before saying their vows.
According to the U.S. Census, less than 500,000 couples lived together before marriage in 1960. By 2011, census estimates show that number increased 16-fold to more than 8.1 million opposite- and same-sex couples.
An April 2016 national survey of about 1,100 adults by the Barna Group found that two-thirds of Americans (65 percent) approve of living together before marriage, and 88 percent of those who support cohabitation say they see it as an effective test of a couple's long-term compatibility before tying the knot.
Play acting, patching it up
Counter-intuitive though it may seem, however, relationship experts say living together actually can impede a couple's ability to get to know each other.
Without a long-term commitment of engagement, let alone marriage, to cement the partnership, cohabitating before marriage often stems from one person being more emotionally invested than the other. When that happens, the more-interested party tends to censor their behavior to try to win their partner over, says Julie Baumgardner, the president and CEO of First Things First, a Chattanooga-based nonprofit that educates couples and families on healthy marriage practices.
"You have someone who's walking on eggshells all the time trying to convince someone, 'I'm the one,'" says Baumgardner, who writes a weekly column for the Times Free Press. "It's actually not real. You've amped it up because now you're living together, and all those constraints come into play."
If couples do move in together, studies show they tend to have a more dour take on the institution of marriage and their eventual union may not last as long as between those who lived separately before the ceremony.
Brad and Jacqui Putt have been married nearly 20 years. Their business is Main Stage Music in downtown Dayton, Tenn.In 2009, researchers at the University of Denver conducted a telephone survey of couples who had been married for less than a decade, asking about their marriage satisfaction and whether they'd ever considered divorce. They found that 19 percent of those who cohabited before marriage had considered dissolving their union compared to 10 percent who waited to live together until they were married.
In a July 23 blog post, University of Denver professor Dr. Scott Stanley says his research suggests that the decision to live together before marriage may be based on a misguided attempt to patch up or save a relationship that's already doomed to fail.
"If you are considering whether or not you should move in with someone to test the relationships, it's likely not the wisest thing you could do," he writes. "In fact, it seems to us that many people who are thinking about testing their relationship by cohabiting already know, on some level, what the grade of that test may be; they are hoping that the answer looks better over time."
But just as destructive natural forces can pave the way for new life and new growth, breaking up an unhealthy relationship can help avoid unhealthy emotional entanglements. In some cases, however, the domestic bonds of living together, such as signing a lease, investing in furniture and co-owning pets, can cause some couples to remain together when they might otherwise have ended the relationship.
"It becomes a lot more complicated to break up," Baumgardner says. "The more constraints you have, the less likely you'd be to choose to walk away."
Not all bad
That's not to say, however, that waiting until marriage to move in together is a cure-all for marital woes.
Trenton, Ga., resident Brooke Wilson and her first husband married in 2002, the year she graduated from Marion County High School. Like the Putts, she and her ex were young and had been dating for two years before getting married. They, too, lived separately - in their respective parents' households - until after the wedding.
It didn't make a difference.
Wilson's marriage lasted for about five years before she filed for divorce. Looking back, she says, she should have seen the end coming since she and her ex-husband had split up and gotten back together several times while they were still dating. But Wilson's ex-husband was the last boyfriend her father met before succumbing to cancer, and sentiment as much as anything drove her to agree when he proposed, she says.
After the wedding, the newlyweds bought a small house in Jasper, Tenn.; Wilson made the down payment using money left to her by her father. Once they were living together, however, the problems immediately began to pile up, from his inability to do his own laundry to the fundamental differences they had when it came to parenting.
"We weren't really right to be together to begin with and, over time, that became more and more apparent," she says. "Those were things that, if we had lived together first, we probably would have known about each other."
That experience, she says, soured her on marrying young and on not living with a prospective spouse before saying "I do."
"There was no silver lining to [waiting] at all," Wilson says. "I think you should live with someone for at least six months before you get married. I feel that there's no possible way to know how someone is on a day-in-day-out basis until you're around them and reach that comfortable point. I feel like it's impossible to reach that point before the six-month mark."
Whether couples decide to cohabit or live separately, relationship experts say, any marriage will benefit from a frank discussion about each person's long-term expectations before popping - or answering - the question.
Just as living together isn't a marital panacea, there are instances when choosing to live together before marriage can be the right one, but only if couples make the transition for the right reasons, says Beth Houle, a master's degree-level marriage and family therapist at Healing Bonds Counseling Services in Cleveland, Tenn
"If you have a couple that are going into a cohabiting situation with the same ideas and the same plan - they've talked about why they want to do it and are on the same page - and they're not doing it because it's cheaper or to test out the relationship, it can work out great," Houle says. "They get to spend more time with each other and learn more about each other.
"The problems start to come in when they're on different pages, which creates an 'I don't know where I stand with you' dynamic."
Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.