Living in sin

Torsten and I have been living together for over a year. We moved in together before we got engaged, when we'd been together just shy of a year. We didn't do it for financial reasons--in fact, we continued to pay two rents for three months after Torsten moved in with me before he was able to work out an agreement with his landlord to terminate his lease early.

We did it because we wanted to live together, we wanted to be together and share that life. It didn't matter to us that we weren't married yet; we aren't religious, and while it's important to us to be married, for us the marriage signifies a public way of legalizing the commitment that we've already made to one another, not something that has to happen before our shared lives can truly begin.

I know there's research out there that says that couples who live together are more likely to wind up divorced. I don't know why that would be, except that maybe people who are willing to live together before marriage are also more willing to get divorced later on if they aren't happy. Maybe that says something bad about premarital cohabitation--that it takes the seriousness away from the relationship, that it makes people less determined to make their marriages work even if they have trouble.

But for us, it hasn't done that. Living together has been an amazing experience, and I would neither give up the wonderful last year that we've spent living together, nor get married a year earlier in order to legitimate the cohabitation. I don't have any sort of moral issue or shame about living with my fiance (who wasn't even my fiance when he moved in), and I'll mention it in any conversation in which it is relevant or tell anyone who asks, even if it's a prim little old granny. If I had any shame about it, I wouldn't do it.

But I've been thinking about this recently because I saw a more conservative coworker ask one of my younger officemates recently if her mother objected to the trip she was planning to take with her boyfriend. The implication was that the mother would be upset about this because the trip together made it clear that the girl and her boyfriend would be sharing a room and even a bed.

The girl was polite about it, and just mildly responded that no, her mother did not have a problem with it, and the older coworker dropped it, and it hasn't come up again. But it made me wonder: Are there certain generations or classes of people who disapprove of premarital cohabitation, or at least of making public references to it? Torsten and I are lucky in that our families are both very relaxed about that sort of thing; they don't have a problem with us living together, they put us in one bedroom when we stay with them, etc. But I know it's not like that for everyone.

So here's what I want to know: What do you think of living together before marriage? Is it something you have done or would do yourself? If you did, would/did you talk about it freely, or would you avoid mentioning it in certain situations?