Probably stupid question: Did unmarried couples used to not be able to live together?

[Anonymous]

Maybe this was true in the 50s? I was in my 20s in the 70s and it was common to live with someone. The 70s was all about "free love". How could you have "free love" if you couldn't live with someone?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My mom *got married* so she could go on vacation with my dad. She's 73.

When I was in Italy in the aughts we had to show a marriage certificate to get a private room together in a hostel. My boyfriend and I were not married, so we were assigned a co-ed space.

I had a similar experience in Spain in the 90s, except he wasn't my boyfriend, just a friend. We had to get separate rooms.

[Anonymous]

I got married in the 80s and lived with my DH before we got married. It was pretty normal, but not universal, among my peers. But I know young people then and today, mostly Catholic, whose parents won't allow it.

Don't take TV as the norm - it used to be scandalous to show anything other than twin beds for a married couple.

[Anonymous]

In the early 90s I lived with my boyfriend and my Catholic parents never acknowledged that we actually lived there. We all sort of kept of the pretext of him having his own place.

Ten years later I was living with my now husband, and my mother no longer had any issues, even when we had a baby before getting married. My father had passed by that time, and we had a gone through a lot of health issues and deaths in the family and she was just happy to have everyone happy and healthy.

My older brother and his wife didn't live together before marriage and I believe didn't have premarital sex, and he was the much more judgemental one. He hated that my husband and I did things "out of order". His own kids are young adults now so we will see if he has mellowed at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It was a bit racy that Mr and Mrs Brady slept in the same bed on the Brady Bunch. Not that long before censors wouldn’t show Ricky and Lucy share the same bed so they had twin beds in the same room.

I buy a lot of antique furniture. It also wasn’t uncommon for married adults to have two twin beds. (I don’t get this at all!)

I know of some older relatives long since dead who shared double beds and in a couple cases twin beds. 🤷‍♀️

My grandparents had twin beds. I am 44. They were happily married.

[Anonymous]

60s: not technically illegal in this country, but highly unusual and not something one would admit in polite society.

70s: began to be a bit trendy with the younger crowd, but anyone over 30 would clutch pearls at the thought.

80s: Those youngsters from the 70s became more mainstream. The trend starts. It's becoming a thing for the 20- and 30-somethings, much to the chagrin of their parents.

90s: No longer taboo among middle-aged adults.

00s - 10s: Quite normal. Some resistance from older or very conservative parents.

Now: People who resist the idea are the weird ones, not those who do it.

For example:
My parents lived together pre-marriage in the early 70s. Not a real issue for their parents, who were quite liberal, but definitely caused a stir with some of the extended family / community.

Early 00s: DH and I moved in together. My parents were fully on board; his (very conservative Catholic) parents were not. When we visited them, we were assigned separate bedrooms on opposite sides of the house. Despite living together and having a wedding date set 6 months in the future.

[Anonymous]

^^Not sure this timeline holds up in the Midwest or the South.

[Anonymous]

I graduated from college in 1994 and was slightly surprised but not scandalized my roommate lived with her boyfriend after. A few years later it was normalized.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You don't sound old enough to be using a computer. Go play outside.

LOL, this. The poster with the timeline above is fairly accurate-- caveat obviously that we're talking about hetero relationships.

~1986-1995, my aunt lived with her boyfriend (they broke up and she married someone else). She was an artist in NYC, but it definitely wasn't unheard of around the DMV either. Still, through the 90s, almost all of my other family members didn't live together before marrying. I remember meeting another teen in the early 90s whose mom lived with a boyfriend and said she'd never marry again, and that was at least unusual.

I would say as of at least the mid-80s that it was still at least as common to get married WITHOUT having lived with someone, and not just if you were religious or waiting to have sex until you were married. Cohabitating before marriage was not seen as simply sensible or a requirement by the majority of people. Remember than in 1985, a 75-year-old grandmother of the bride would have been born in 1910, and a 55-year-old mother in 1930.

Also in the 80s and even the 90s, if you did live together, it was expected generally to be a step on the road to likely marriage. Now, that's still probably true of the majority, but many people never plan on marrying, which I feel like was rarer pre-2000 or so.

Also pre-1995 or so, the vast majority of people who were living together would at least get married quickly if the woman got pregnant, but now it seems that in as many as half of those cases, they marry years later when they have more time to plan a big wedding or just never marry.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A little off topic, but I'm 50 and was pretty amazed to hear my mother talk about having trouble getting a bank account in her name in the early 1970s.

My mom is the one who got married to go on vacation. She made more than my dad and could not get credit card in her own name. Same timeframe.

My mother was divorced with 3 little kids in the late 70s. She had income but no credit or mortgage in her own name. She told me she "screamed her way" into a Mastercharge Card (later Mastercard) because the bank was so discriminatory.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don't sound old enough to be using a computer. Go play outside.

LOL, this. The poster with the timeline above is fairly accurate-- caveat obviously that we're talking about hetero relationships.

~1986-1995, my aunt lived with her boyfriend (they broke up and she married someone else). She was an artist in NYC, but it definitely wasn't unheard of around the DMV either. Still, through the 90s, almost all of my other family members didn't live together before marrying. I remember meeting another teen in the early 90s whose mom lived with a boyfriend and said she'd never marry again, and that was at least unusual.

I would say as of at least the mid-80s that it was still at least as common to get married WITHOUT having lived with someone, and not just if you were religious or waiting to have sex until you were married. Cohabitating before marriage was not seen as simply sensible or a requirement by the majority of people. Remember than in 1985, a 75-year-old grandmother of the bride would have been born in 1910, and a 55-year-old mother in 1930.

Also in the 80s and even the 90s, if you did live together, it was expected generally to be a step on the road to likely marriage. Now, that's still probably true of the majority, but many people never plan on marrying, which I feel like was rarer pre-2000 or so.

Also pre-1995 or so, the vast majority of people who were living together would at least get married quickly if the woman got pregnant, but now it seems that in as many as half of those cases, they marry years later when they have more time to plan a big wedding or just never marry.

I'm adding that the Pill and Roe v Wade had a lot to do with all this.

Most people don't live together without having sex. You have sex without a 99%+ BC method and there's a good chance you'll get pregnant within a couple of years, maybe even a few months. You get pregnant without being married, well, even the Puritans did that. But you get married post-haste. The stigma for unmarried mothers is stronger and lasted longer than the stigma for unmarried cohabitation-- it's still going. So you were taking a chance. What if the guy wasn't that serious? What if he left you? Not that he couldn't do that if you were married, but at least you wouldn't have gotten OMGpregnantoutofwedlock. So there's that. When couples had a greater assurance they could live together indefinitely (at least in theory) without a pregnancy, it was safer in terms of social stigma. It was more "admitting you have sex," which was less stigmatizing than taking the chance of "raising a b****rd child."

[Anonymous]

We couldn't sign an apt lease together as unmarried. There might have been cohabitation then, it was really rare and frowned upon. 1978 Silver Spring.


Wish we had lived together, because I wouldn't have ever married him.

Also, hotel bookings..you had to be Mr and Mrs., but they just believed you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Maybe this was true in the 50s? I was in my 20s in the 70s and it was common to live with someone. The 70s was all about "free love". How could you have "free love" if you couldn't live with someone?

No, not really. You could share a lease with same sex only. You might be able to live with boyfriend if you didn't have both names on lease, or only one owned the house. This didn't change until around 1984 ish