' cohabitation is about sex and the lack of ability/desire/circumstance to make a permanent commitment through marriage.'

So what of all the relationships where there is sex but no cohabitation. Single households are on the rise. I know heaps of people who have been a monogomous sexually active couple without ever living together. Nobody needs to cohabit before having sex in a monogomous relationship. Cohabiting is just as much about economic concerns as anything else.

You seem to come from the conclusion there is some ideal or goal that everyone universally wants from a relationship to start with.

You're begging the question.

What you really need to do is find a sample of people who intend to get married with their current partner AND are living together with that partner before you go off analysing statistics about cohabiting and marriage.

Nor was I suggesting that you should, Bernard.

>>My article however was not a summary of the AIFS document so I had no intention of going through it point by point<<

But it is clear that you used the report's "Cohabitation" section as the basis for your statistics, which were in turn the basis for the majority of your deductions from those statistics. Using such a fragile foundation for an article that scolds people for entering into a phase of a relationship that you disapprove of, does nothing for your argument. It is not surprising that people have been picking holes in it, since you have been generalizing from a set of numbers that does not support your case.

If there had been genuine substance in your claims that cohabitation is a "bad thing", the statistics would be there to support it. Instead, you are left with nothing more than a platform from which to trumpet your own views on chastity.

Which is not a problem in itself, of course; this is an opinion forum, after all. But using shaky numbers has the effect of undermining your position, even at the moral level.

Discussing statistics, as others have noted, is mostly futile. I would say statistics rarely give weight or clarity to these types of arguments. They’re always a bit shaky and interpretive at best. Any pollster who tries to get information from people about what they do in the bedroom is likely to get some skewed results, and I take any conclusions drawn from them with a dose of salt.

When we look at the question of how many gay people there are in the community, one hears of polls varying from anywhere from less than one percent to more than 10 or 15%. The truth is anyone’s guess. Then there are the polls about opinions on gay marriage. The media want to hold up the notion that gay marriage has widespread support in the community. Much depends on who is conducting the poll and how they word the question. I don’t think Julia really believes these gay marriage polls being at all accurate, or as the political expedient that she is (that most politicians are, including Mr. Obama, desperate for a few votes in the next few months) she would have jumped on the band wagon.

Any article of this nature should use statistics sparingly (which Bernard has, though somewhat clumsily) if at all.

As a young woman, I always found that if dating the same person didn't last for 3 months, it meant they weren't compatible. I believe it's a sufficient time period to know if someone is Mr or Ms Right.

Certainly 6 months is more than enough for a couple to establish whether or not they have a high level of compatibility.

I think Premarriage Counselling should be mandatory, so people can truly examine their expectations, various likely pitfalls and areas of potential incompatibility e.g. the situation where someone wants 6 children and the other wants none.

As for "trying it before buying it", I used to think this was just some kind of crude excuse for not marrying anyone, but after speaking with a number of divorced men who discussed their sexual relationships with their former wives, I now think it is essential.

There is no point matching a person who is very inhibited with someone who is outrageously uninhibited (or even perverted). People who wish to behave like animals in a bedroom should not be matched with uptight cherubs.

Lorikeet,
These divorced men of whom you speak, who found themselves so wildly and outrageously uninhibited in comparison to their wives, how do we think they got that way in the first place? 

Do we think they may have been sexually active and rather experienced before their marriage? I suspect so.

When a couple come together in purity, having previously kept themselves for their wedding night, they have the opportunity to grow in intimacy together, starting from that same beginning point.

A fascinating insight into your views on human sexuality, Dan S de Merengue.

>>When a couple come together in purity, having previously kept themselves for their wedding night, they have the opportunity to grow in intimacy together, starting from that same beginning point.<<

I suspect that your methodology would not even work for a couple learning to play Bridge together, let alone an activity as unpredictable and exciting as sex. And the idea of a common starting point, given that in most cases they will be of the opposite sex, is also dubious in the extreme.

A somewhat dangerous theory too, in some respects, as it would place a level of expectation on the couple that their experiences will, by definition, be "normal", and that any disappointments need to be sublimated for the greater good of the union.

Not a particularly stable state if affairs, I would have thought. And possibly quite threatening to the mental health of one or the other partner.

But heck, what do I know about you religious types, you may consider this to be just another obstacle that the Lord places in your path, or something.