align=justify>Those were the years that followed upon the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s. It was a time of experimentation and challenging of all the conventional dictates of sexual morality. High on the list of suggested practices that were formerly held to be taboo was premarital cohabitation. Cohabitation promised to be the solution to failed marriages because living together would certainly allow the prospective husband and wife to come to know each better than they ever could if they lived apart. This knowledge would then virtually ensure that their marriage would be happy and that it would last until death.

Now, decades after cohabitation became acceptable among young adults (and sometimes among not-so-young adults), there is plenty of research that shows just how wrong that logic is. In spite of that research, many young people remain convinced that cohabitation is the best possible preparation for marriage. As they say, denial is not just a river in Egypt.

Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D., senior fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute in Washington, D.C., has assembled some very disturbing statistics about cohabitation as that relates to a happy marriage. Her report includes research from the likes of Yale University, Columbia University, the University of Chicago and a number of other prestigious sources.

Here is what her research yielded:

— The divorce rate for women who cohabit is nearly 80 percent higher than for those who do not.

— The typical cohabiting relationship is both fragile and short-lived, averaging about 18 months in duration, with less than 40 percent ending in marriage.

— While many couples say that they plan to live together primarily in order to share expenses, in fact, women typically contribute more than 70 percent of the income in cohabiting relationships.

— Marriage is physically healthier than cohabitation. The number of STD’s (sexually transmitted diseases) in cohabiting females is six times higher than in married women.

— Within a one-year period 35 out of every 100 cohabiting couples experienced physical aggression, compared to 15 out of every 100 married couples.

— Women are 62 times more likely to be assaulted by a live-in boyfriend than if they were living with their husbands.

— Children of cohabiting couples have roughly twice the risk of social and behavioral problems (anxiety, depression, eating disorders and other psycho-social difficulties) compared with children in married-parent families.

— Rates of serious abuse of children are 20 times higher in cohabiting, biological-parent families and 33 times higher when the mother is cohabiting with a boyfriend.

— The poverty rate for children in cohabiting households is 31 percent, compared to 6 percent in married households.

You do not have to be a rocket scientist to see that these studies, and many others like them, reveal that cohabitation just doesn’t work as a preparation for marriage — or as a preparation for anything other than sadness and disappointment. Far too many of our young people will simply not take findings like these seriously, and as a result, like so many in the generation before them, they are cooking up a recipe for disaster.

These statistical findings merely give support to the age-old teachings of the Church regarding chastity and marriage. If those teachings seem too "old-fashioned" for some of today’s young people, let’s hope and pray that scientific findings like those of Dr. Crouse will scare a little sense into them.