Most couples in Vancouver who walk into premarital counselling have already been living together — some for a year, others for five or more. The question is rarely whether to move in. The question, the one that matters, is whether they ever actually decided on the relationship, or simply drifted into it.
Researchers call this the difference between sliding and deciding, and four decades of data say it predicts more about a couple’s future than how much they fight, how compatible they look on paper, or how long they have been together.
The cohabitation effect — what the research says
In 2006, Scott Stanley, Galena Rhoades, and Howard Markman at the University of Denver published a study that changed the way relationship scientists think about living together. Their paper, “Sliding Versus Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect,” argued that cohabitation itself is not the problem. The problem is what they called relationship inertia: once a couple shares a lease, a dog, and a set of IKEA shelves, the practical costs of breaking up rise sharply — even if neither partner has consciously chosen the relationship as a long-term commitment (Stanley, Rhoades & Markman, 2006, Family Relations, DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3729.2006.00418.x).
The concept is deceptively simple. Two people start spending nights together. One lease ends, and moving in saves money. A year passes. Another year. Marriage comes up — but more as a next step on a conveyor belt than as a deliberate, mutual choice. Stanley’s team found that couples who slid into cohabitation without a clear mutual commitment beforehand showed lower marital satisfaction, higher rates of negative interaction, and greater likelihood of divorce than couples who decided together before sharing a home.
The key word is before. It was not living together that caused trouble. It was the absence of a shared, conscious decision about the direction of the relationship before the practical entanglements made leaving difficult.
Cohabitation in Canada — the numbers
Canada has one of the highest cohabitation rates in the Western world. The 2021 Census found that 23 per cent of all couples nationally were living common-law, a 447 per cent increase since 1981. In British Columbia the figure sits around 18 per cent. Among young adults aged 20 to 24, roughly 79 per cent of those in couple relationships were common-law rather than married (Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population).
In other words, most couples arriving at a Vancouver therapist’s door have been cohabiting — often for years — before the idea of marriage or long-term commitment is discussed openly. That is the landscape. The question is what to do with it.
What “sliding” looks like in real life
Sliding rarely announces itself. It looks like efficiency: one partner’s lease is up, the other has a spare room, and it makes financial sense. It looks like love: they want to wake up together every morning. It looks like a test: “let’s see if we can handle living together before we commit.”
None of these motivations are wrong. But Stanley’s research — replicated and extended over two decades — consistently finds that the reason couples move in together matters enormously for what happens next. Couples who moved in to test the relationship, or who drifted in without discussing it, carried more ambiguity about the future. That ambiguity did not disappear under the same roof. It went underground, surfacing later as resentment, avoidance, or the quiet feeling that one partner is more committed than the other.
This asymmetry — what clinicians sometimes call asymmetric commitment — is one of the most common patterns Samuel sees in premarital and couples work. One partner assumed moving in meant “we are building a life.” The other assumed it meant “we are seeing how it goes.” Neither said so out loud. By the time the difference surfaces, it has been operating silently for years.
Does cohabitation before marriage increase divorce risk?
The short answer: it depends on how and why the couple moved in together.
Early studies suggested a straightforward “cohabitation effect” — that living together before marriage increased divorce risk. But more recent and methodologically stronger research has complicated that picture. A 2019 study by Michael Rosenfeld and Katharina Roesler, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, found that couples who cohabited before marriage did not have higher divorce rates in the first year — but did show elevated risk in subsequent years (Rosenfeld & Roesler, 2019, DOI: 10.1111/jomf.12530).
What appears to matter most is not the fact of cohabitation but the quality of the transition from living together to being married. Couples who treated marriage as a deliberate choice — who had explicit conversations about commitment, values, finances, children, and conflict style before or shortly after moving in — fared significantly better than those who let the relationship carry them forward on momentum alone.
What premarital counselling actually does
Premarital counselling is not about convincing anyone to get married. It is about making the decision — whichever direction it goes — a conscious one.
In Samuel’s practice, premarital work uses the Gottman Method assessment as its backbone, often combined with Internal Family Systems (IFS) when one or both partners carry patterns from their families of origin that are shaping the relationship in ways they have not yet examined. The Gottman assessment is built on longitudinal research into what predicts relationship success and failure. It does not guess. It measures — how the couple argues, how they repair after conflict, how much genuine friendship and fondness remain, and whether each partner feels known by the other (The Gottman Institute, Research).
For couples who have been living together, the assessment often reveals patterns that have been running quietly in the background: one partner habitually avoids conflict while the other pursues it. Financial assumptions that were never spoken aloud. Different timelines for children that neither has named. An in-law dynamic that one partner endures and the other does not see. The perpetual problems — Gottman research found that roughly two-thirds of relationship problems are perpetual, rooted in personality or values — that the couple has been stepping around rather than dialoguing about.
The goal is not to solve those problems. Many of them will never be solved. The goal is to move them from gridlock to dialogue: to understand the dream or fear behind each partner’s position so the couple can live with the difference rather than being silently eroded by it.
What couples who have been living together need to talk about
Every couple’s list is different, but certain topics come up with striking regularity in premarital sessions with cohabiting couples in Vancouver:
Money. Not just who pays what, but what money means to each person. One partner may have grown up in scarcity and treats saving as survival. The other may have grown up in comfort and treats spending as connection. Neither is wrong. Both need to be named.
In-laws and extended family. How much involvement is welcome? How much is obligatory? For Iranian-Canadian and other bicultural couples, this is often the most loaded topic — caught between taarof and Canadian directness, between family loyalty and the couple’s right to set boundaries.
Children. Not just whether, but when, how many, and according to whose values. The couple who agrees they want children may discover they disagree deeply about discipline, religion, language, or schooling.
Conflict style. How do they fight? Does one partner flood and shut down (what Gottman calls stonewalling) while the other escalates? Have they ever repaired an argument successfully, or do they just wait for it to blow over?
The question behind the question. Did they decide to be together — or did they slide? And if they slid, are they willing to decide now?
For Iranian-Canadian couples
For couples navigating life between two cultures, the sliding-versus-deciding question often carries additional weight. Family expectations about marriage timelines, the role of extended family in decision-making, the pressure of آبرو (reputation), and the acculturation gap — one partner settling into Canadian life faster than the other — can all make the transition from cohabitation to marriage more loaded and more silent than it needs to be.
Samuel offers premarital counselling in both Farsi and English, with a genuine understanding of these pressures. The work does not dismiss culture. It treats culture as a real variable — something that shapes the perpetual problems a couple will face and needs to be spoken about directly, not worked around.
When to come — and what it costs
The best time for premarital counselling is before the wedding stress begins — but any time before the marriage is valuable, and couples who have been living together for years often benefit most because they arrive with real data about how their relationship works under pressure.
Sessions take place in person at 1300–1500 West Georgia Street in downtown Vancouver, or by secure video anywhere in British Columbia. Evening and weekend appointments are available. Fees and expenses are covered by ICBC, CVAP, FNHA, IFHP, RCMP, VAC, and most other insurers, and direct billing is available.
Start with a free 20-minute consultation: call or WhatsApp 604-721-0604, or request a callback.
Related: Premarital Counselling in Vancouver · Gottman Method Couples Therapy · The Acculturation Gap in Iranian-Canadian Couples