Marriage versus Living Together - Essay Example

13 June Marriage versus living together: Marriage was once thought of as a sacred bond and honoring its value was a definite obligation upon everyone wanting to share a physical relationship with some another person. The concept of marriage is still just the same in some parts of the world but it is the concept of cohabitation or living together which presently dominates in the progressive, secular, and modernized nations of the world. This paper strives to identify some most basic similarities and differences between marriage and living together as it is very important for the people to acknowledge how similar and different marriage and cohabitation are in the short and long run as both have an immense power to influence a society for better or worse.

For one thing, both marriage and cohabitation involve two people in a committed relationship living together for a definite or unlimited time period with mutual agreement. While husband and wife live together after honoring the value of marriage, both partners live together in cohabitation also with complete harmony and peace of mind. Cohabiting people live without the presence of a legal bond called marriage so there are no legal formalities to be handled if any problem in the relationship ever occurs.

In contrast, a married couple more often than not starts facing many problems soon after living together as marriage may not be the right kind of thing for everyone which is exactly why “some couples choose to live together without the benefit of a legal union” (FindLaw). However, both marriage and living together are similar in this sense that in both trends, people share an intimate relationship, there is fair amount of love, commitment on both sides, sexual interest, and trust on one another.

Both married and cohabiting people often enjoy very serious relationships though differences may exist depending on situation. Both married and cohabiting people have to share finance or at least, they have to lose something should the relationship get rocky and fail. In both types of relationships, partners share rent and each is required to pay half of it. Basically, it only depends upon the two people living together if the very significant differences between marriage and living together appear on the surface or not and which may include divorce or simply walking out on each other.

Now, divorce involves heavy legal penalties while cohabitation mostly involves no such penalty. The number of people simply living together with each other without getting married is increasing day by day in US and this trend of cohabitation is considered more of a norm now than anything. This is because though people want to share permanent relationships, still they prefer cohabitation to marriage as they want to avoid the trouble and expense of divorce should any situation arise. Summing up, this much becomes clear from the above discussion that more and more people in the westernized society prefer to live together than jumping onto a formalized spot called marriage at once.

People do not hasten to get married soon these days. Differences between marriage and living together exist in how the relationship is handled, what the two people in that relationship think about their journey together, and how far each one of them intends to go along. Work cited:FindLaw. “Marriage vs. Cohabitation.” 2010. Web. 13 Jun. 2012.