On Cohabitation Before Marriage: an Open Letter to a Catholic Couple

Dear—
 

Congratulations on your engagement and thanks so much for writing and for asking this question. Too few young Catholics today seek reliable “opposition counsel” before making massively important decisions in their lives, and by so doing, you demonstrate humility, a desire to know and understand the Church’s teaching and ultimately, to be obedient to God. Following through on these commitments will never lead you wrong.

As a parish priest, one of the things I’m charged with is applying the Church’s teaching and law on marriage at the moment of most immediate impact: with couples asking for a Church wedding. So I have to begin with this: the Church does not condone cohabitation before marriage. Let’s see if I can explain the central issues without going on too long.

Pre-marital cohabitation is commonplace in the broader society and increasingly so among even otherwise practicing Catholics. The total breakdown of public consensus on the meaning and necessities of marriage makes for a prevailing social background such that there is no longer any negative sanction given by the broader society on any sort of living arrangement whatsoever between unmarried, romantically involved people. In former times, when the larger society supported many basic traditional Christian tenets of morality and ethics, it was easier for Christians to align their lives, at least publically, with those tenets. Those times are long over. Because humans are irreducibly social beings, it takes considerable courage to swim against the cultural tide. So again, I commend you for bringing this issue up before it becomes fait accompli.

The fact that priests will admit cohabiting couples to the Sacrament of Matrimony is no testimony to the fact that the Church looks upon cohabitation as ok. Far from it. The Church must adhere to the “law of gradualness” (every step of progress toward living in the truth is progress towards salvation) rather than the “gradualness of the law” (even though there is an “ideal”, there is no concrete expectation that anyone actually adhere to it). Gradualness in the moral life is, after all, the way in which people become saints. But the goodness, the very reality of the moral law, is betrayed when it is treated as an ideal toward which no progress ought concretely to be made.

So here’s an entry into the Church’s rationale and teaching on marriage in the light of the question of cohabitation. In the end we’ll have achieved a short primer on Christian marriage in Catholic teaching. I appreciate your taking the time to read and consider it all, and of course I’d be happy to meet with you to talk more about this in-person or to correspond more by email if you'd like.
 

Free, Faithful, Fruitful, Total

In our secular culture the word “marriage” is a vacuous placeholder-term which can be filled with any content whatsoever by anyone—whatever someone thinks marriage is, it is indeed that for that person and who are we to judge? But to the contrary, the Catholic Church teaches that marriage has its own natural laws, and because the law of marriage applies to everyone, everyone can in principle partake in marriage and the universality of marriage is a source of social unity across cultures, eras, and epochs, whereas its degradation is a source of disunity.

One way of summing up the natural law of marriage is through the four-fold definition “free, faithful, fruitful, and total” (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1601 ff). These characteristics apply to marriage generally, whether the couple is Christian or not. For baptized Christians, however, since marriage has been raised by Christ to the level of sacrament (we’ll talk more about what this means later on), the reality of natural marriage is both received and transformed. Even though Protestant Christians are (obviously) not under the juridical governance of the Catholic Church’s marriage law (except when a Protestant wants to marry a Catholic), the Church’s teaching on the sacramentality of Christian marriage applies to them as well. Neither are the unbaptized excluded from the natural law of marriage, since they too are created by God for an eternal destiny and made for receiving the divine graces available in the Church. Yet, because marriage is a natural as well as sacramental reality, we must speak of marriage in its multi-fold relevance: what applies to everyone, and what specially applies to baptized Christians and then certainly to Catholics under Church law.

Marriage is free in that it cannot be coerced (for a forced marriage is no marriage at all). It is, in fact, one of the fundamental goals of the pre-marital process in the Catholic Church to ensure that this particular man and woman are free both to contract marriage in itself and to marry one another. After that it remains for the Church to help bring about in the engaged couple the conversion of mind and heart which alone brings them the power to live in the freedom of Christian marriage. But it is also the case that the state (civil government) has an interest in marriage and it has enacted certain laws which qualify or disqualify people from getting married (e.g. minimum age restrictions, prohibition of “plural marriage,” other stipulations which define a “null” marriage). Even our secular, non-sectarian government legislates rules about marriage.

Even after these essential issues of freedom have been established, it remains that a couple can voluntarily put themselves and each other into a situation which undermines in them the needful sense of freedom they should properly enjoy. They can rather create for themselves a kind of psychological trap which robs them of the proper psycho-emotional security they would otherwise know had they made a clear demarcation between their lives as single people and their life together as a married couple. Pre-marital sexual involvement (nearly always a feature of pre-marital cohabitation) also contributes greatly to the psychological trap. To put it clearly: while pre-marital sex and cohabitation do not in themselves “vitiate the will” (make the proper activity of the will inoperative such that the marriage cannot be contracted freely and therefore validly), by creating this “psychological trap” the couple endangers their sense of the reality of their marriage: now that they’ve walked the aisle, what has practically changed for them in their day-to-day life at home? It can seem as if nothing has changed and thus the pseudo-reality of the prior situation creeps into the authentic reality of the married state.

Sex and cohabitation are in fact fundamental natural symbols of marriage. Enacting these symbols before marriage creates a psychological vitiation of the symbol after the marriage, a suffering from which many couples never recover and which so often leads to all sorts of dysfunctions in the spousal relationship. There are studies which show that cohabitation prior to marriage, especially of a year or more, correlates strongly with divorce. We are entitled to infer for the reasons sketched out just now that this correlation is also causative.

Next, marriage must be faithful. This means more than simply a lifetime commitment to one partner, the lawful spouse—a commitment that is only dissolved with the death of one of the spouses. It also means that faithfulness unlocks all the privileges that belong to a life commitment. The privilege of common household and deeply intertwined, in fact unified, lives—spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, physically—is the privilege of marriage and marriage alone. To attempt entry into the content of married life (living as a married couple) without the presence of the form of marriage (the proper vows and accompanying graces) constitutes a systematic falsehood radically incompatible with faithfulness, since faithfulness just involves truthfulness, whatever else it entails—truthfulness before God, the families and friends (society), and for Christians, the Church. Pre-marital cohabitation, like pre-marital sex, constitutes a kind of formal mendacity, a systematic untruthfulness, which does not remain purely private but is also foisted upon others, upon society, and again, for Christians, upon the Church, contributing to breakdown at all levels of society including the “Society of Christ” that is the Church.

Thirdly, marriage is fruitful. Fruitfulness includes the possibility (and actuality, if God grants this) of children from the marriage. But this is not all that we should mean by fruitfulness. It means also the very bond of love itself between husband and wife, that the common household and all that goes with it is a right, privilege, and special joy that belongs properly only to lawfully married people truly enjoying the agonies and ecstasies of married life. The fruitfulness of the marriage bond includes the radiation of love’s healing effects out into the neighborhood and wider society. Married love counteracts the rampant infidelity and the bitterness, resentment, and hopelessness, the spiritual decay that infidelity engenders in society. Thus, marriage is a mission to others, to the world.

The couple refusing to come under the discipline of marriage can neither enjoy nor impart the essential fruit of married love. Without discipleship the mission cannot be fulfilled. Yet the couple which lives together before marriage reduces for itself but also for society the deep symbolism of marriage to mere “official ceremony” which appears to effect no reality and is therefore presented as something fundamentally unreal and mendacious. Marriage itself is a feast and it is proper that the event of the wedding be festive and accompanied by solemn (which means not “sad” but rather “serious”) festival. A solemn festival without a matching seriousness in those who partake in it is rendered hollow, inauthentic, and risks rising to the level of cynicism. Haven’t we had our fill of the bitter fruit of infidelity in our contemporary culture? Let us no more contribute to it.

Lastly, marriage is total. This means that the spouses hold back no proper gift from one another. But a couple cohabiting before marriage is holding back the most precious thing of all from one another—the formal commitment of marriage itself (!) which, for Christians, includes the sacramental grace of marriage (in our theology of marriage, the Catholic couple bestows the sacrament upon one another with the priest as the Church’s public witness). Because human beings are made “in the likeness of the image” of God, we are beings of reason and will—we can know what we are doing and set ourselves to purposeful action. We are also, like God, beings “of the word,” that is, we speak our minds and intentions, and this self-speaking makes our rational intention present and effective before others and ourselves. A life lived this way is what it means to live in the truth.

The sacraments are real and have real effects, but they are not magical transformations of the person. Rather, they work upon the real structure of the human person, in heart, mind, and body—the person as psychosomatic (soul-body) unity. An unreceptive heart becomes duplicitous and speaks a false word about itself. The false heart receives and bestows the sacraments unworthily and cuts itself off from the graces the sacraments convey. This is no way to begin a Christian marriage.

The Logic of the Gift

In short, because marriage is a grace (either natural, or for baptized persons, sacramental) a great gift from God, the cohabiting couple is refusing the gift as gift, but rather snatching it, as it were, out of the hands of the giving God. This grasping brings ruin upon the gift, the relationship with the giver, and to the human community. We must remember that we cannot truly give and receive in our finite freedom except that we have first received freely from God’s infinite freedom. The gift is neither something we can earn nor take for ourselves by force of will. The gift is offered freely and must be accepted freely, which means in gratitude, or it is no gift at all. The first rule in authentic gift-reception is acceptance of the giver’s terms. What are the terms of an authentic giver, the true giver? What is the “logic of the gift”? The true gift is always and only for the good of the other but because this is so, the true gift is for the unity of gift and giver. Gift is not just the sign of friendship but also the maker of friendship. The law or “rules” of the gifts God offers are for our salvation and for the salvation of the world. God is the perfect giver who loves freely, faithfully, fruitfully, and totally, and God’s love is a saving love because it comes to us when we are unworthy and transforms us into beings of worthiness. In short, God aims to make us like himself and his sacramental love is how he accomplished this.
 

Christian Marriage: Symbol of Christ and His Body the Church
 

“‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:31-32).

St. Paul explicitly links Christian marriage to that which was divinely ordained “from the beginning,” which we learn about in the second creation story of Genesis chapter two. Marriage, in fact, is a symbol of God’s love for us as manifest in Christ’s marriage to the Church, and herein lies its great grace: in the Sacrament of Marriage God makes us partners in his act of love for us, makes it so that we can share in the love he offers us in a unique way. Marriage is a supremely Eucharistic symbol because the grace of marriage incorporates the married couple in their sacrificial self-giving to one another more deeply into the unity of the Body of Christ. Therefore marriage contributes greatly to the total union of the Body. In obeying the law of marriage we help fulfill our responsibility to the Christian community, the Body of Christ.

The sacramental structure of divine giving-receiving that is the Body of Christ is disfigured by any attempt of baptized Christians to counterfeit the giving-receiving relationship of marriage outside of the covenant of marriage. The marvelous, particular gift of love that is Christian marriage is harmed or even spoiled if we refuse the gift as gift and instead “grasp” for it as a “right” by mere individual will—remember, this is precisely the original sin of the Garden: taking and eating the fruit before it is offered by the giver. Thus the meaning of “The Fall” is revealed as precisely the spoliation of the giver-gift relation. The Church’s teaching is not about controlling our lives, but about helping us gain access to the graces needed for self-control according to the rational nature God has created us with, and according to the divine love which alone can bring reconciliation into the fallen human condition.

Marriage is worth the wait. The sacrifice and anticipation of the waiting is a preparation for love, a test of love, and it makes truest love and therefore truest happiness and joy possible.

Thanks again so much for listening and thinking these things through, and please remember I’m perfectly happy to continue the conversation in any way you might like, as best as I can accommodate.

All blessings to you and your fiancé.

- FrBH
 

Fr. Byron Hagan is co-pastor of St. Mary's Lowertown (St. Paul) since 1 July 2021. Together with Fr. Bryce Evans, he is an aspirant to the founding of an Oratory of St. Philip Neri in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Fr. Hagan is a frequent contributor to MSP Catholic as well as to Deep Down Things podcast.