‘90s FAMILY : The Motto of the ‘90s? If They Can’t Commit, They Must Split

In Los Angeles, an independent, professional woman contemplating a first marriage initiates a survey of her friends: Is it better, she asks, to marry or just live together? The consensus surprises her. “Marry!” they chorus.

In Seattle, a schoolteacher and a doctor begin dating. On one of their first dates, the teacher mentions she once lived with a man and would never do it again outside of marriage. He sighs with relief. He’d never do it again either.

Across the country, therapists are quizzing couples who want to live together: Why don’t they want to get married?

It’s becoming clear that living together, a lingering artifact of the counterculture ‘60s, is being viewed in the cool light of the ‘90s much like lava lamps and earth shoes.

Some say opting for marriage is a sure sign of our uncertain times and growing social conservatism. “It’s a time when people are looking for more traditional ways of being in the world because it’s scary not to,” says Marianne Walters, a therapist from Washington, D.C. Others say it’s a positive sign of growing up.

As yet, the neo-traditionalists do not constitute even a statistical blip. According to the latest U.S. Census, the households of “never married, unmarried couples” are still rising and now number more than 1 million. But the numbers are starting to level off, says Los Angeles therapist Marcia Lasswell, president of the American Assn. of Marriage and Family Therapists.

Women in particular, she says, are more independent, choosier and wonder what’s in it for them. When couples move in together, she says, the housekeeping chores often revert to women. “They think, ‘Why should I do that? If I’m going to give up my freedom for a man, I want to be married.’ ”

For many women, the urge to marry is mostly about having a child. They are looking to use the financial and legal security of marriage to create a nest.

Lasswell says couples who view living together as a first step toward commitment are usually deluding themselves. Most couples who live together do not go on to marry later, she says.

Women pushed by their biological clocks and hoping to marry are wasting time living with men who, guided by “social clocks,” aren’t yet ready, she says. Those men cannot commit to a relationship until they feel stable enough.

Moreover, living together offers no legal protections. Gay couples, too, are pushing for ways to be legally married. “It’s not because marriage is so wonderful,” Walters says. “But if you don’t have it, you can’t get a spouse’s health insurance.”

Experience has made one woman older and wiser.

Lisa, the 30-year-old Seattle schoolteacher, says that at 25, she did not want or need to be married. She and a boyfriend, a store clerk, “fell into” living together, a situation that lasted four years. She figured she was still young and had plenty of time to find the right man, settle down and have kids. Looking back, she realizes she was hoping her live-in boyfriend would become Mr. Right, but “he never really did.”

Now she knows that what she wanted was “somebody who was really responsible, more ambitious, financially secure, somebody I could count on to make a good decision with when we go to buy our first home. In the back of my mind, I thought, what if something happened to me? Would I want this person to be left with three kids?”

Living together was a mistake, she says, because she lost four years of dating other people. “If we’re not committed enough to get married, but live together, it eliminates all other possibilities. I need to have an opportunity to date someone else.

“I will never do it again, under any circumstances. I’m really adamant about that.”