In the next two articles in the series on Sex and Faith I address two areas of sexual behaviour which
call for fresh thinking from the Christian community. One is the practice of couples living together
before marriage. The other is sexual relationships between people of the same sex. I will address in
this article the question of unmarried couples living together. "Living together" is here understood in
its common meaning, which includes the couple having sex with one another.

In my previous article I defined love as the choice to do what one believes to be for the good of
another. Using this definition, I ask: Can a person choose to live with another person in the
reasonable belief that is for the other's good?

As someone who has been actively involved in ministry for the past twenty years and has prepared
numerous young couples for marriage and officiated at their weddings, I can say that living together
has become the norm for young people today. I would be hard put to come up with more than a
handful of cases in which the couple I married were not already living together. This is true for both
Catholic and Protestant couples. I have also known of members of my extended family who have
lived together before marriage.

Many of these couples try to live the Christian faith as best they can. Many of them are spiritually
aware people who know the difference between love and selfishness. When we see that a whole
generation of young people, including those who have faith and will become the pillars of the
Christian community in the future, have concluded with complete sincerity that their choice to live
with a particular person is not sinful, we must conclude that that there has been a shift in moral
sensibility. The world has changed and the younger generation has adapted to that change
appropriately. When the Church understands theologically what young people are doing, it can
present a teaching that will help young people integrate living together into their life of faith.

I think I have known enough of these couples well enough to generalize and say that most of them do
believe that living together is good for both of them. And they believe that this belief is reasonable.
When asked why they chose to live together, they produce reasons that make sense to them. One
reason they commonly offer is that they love one another and are already committed to one another.
They do not see the formal taking of marriage vows as adding anything more to the commitment they
have already made to one another. Another reason they commonly offer is that living together would
help them know whether they ought to marry the person they are living with. They believe that
living together happily proves that they are compatible, that there is no other way of proving
compatibility, and that they should marry only if they are compatible.

Let's look at each of these reasons. By definition marriage, as Catholics understand it, is a
relationship in which the couple are committed to live together in love for life. This commitment is
a personal choice that the couple make and it does not require a particular formula of commitment or
a ceremony, nor does it require the involvement of anyone else to validate it, not even the Church.
The commitment is a choice that the couple make in their hearts and communicate to one another in
ways of their own choosing, so that each of them knows, with as much certitude as such things can
be known, that the commitment is mutual. If a couple have made that commitment, they are, from a
spiritual point of view, married, whether or not they have married in a legal or canonical sense.
(This is the basis for the Church's teaching that the couple are the ministers of the sacrament
of matrimony to one another. The officiating priest at a wedding is merely a witness.)

If a couple have married spiritually, then not only is it reasonable for them to believe that living
together is for each other's good, it would be unreasonable for them to think otherwise.
Because they are married in fact, their sexual relationship cannot be regarded as sinful. And because
the existence of the spiritual bond can be known with certitude only by the couple, the Church
cannot judge, apart from the testimony of the couple themselves, whether a spiritual marriage exists
or not. From this it follows, of course, that the Church cannot judge whether a couple who live
together are committing a sexual sin, unless they themselves confess it.

While not failing in their obligation to one another, the couple may, however, be failing in their
obligation to their families and society. The good order of family and social life calls for marriage to
be celebrated and acknowledged. So important is it to establish publicly the existence of a marriage,
that the law will declare a couple de facto married if they live together long enough (common law
marriage), whether or not the couple themselves make this declaration about themselves. Couples
who refuse to take the necessary steps to make their spiritual marriage known to and recognized by
family and society, knowing the legitimate interest that family and society have in determining
whether a marriage exists, may be guilty of a sin against their civic obligations.

I have known several couples of whom I would say that they were de facto married before they legally
married. Couples are more quick to realize that they have a marital relationship than they are to
realize that they have a civic obligation to legalize the marriage, and so there is usually a gap
between the coming into existence of the spiritual marriage and its legal solemnization.

The second reason that couples often give for living together - that it is a way of assessing
compatibility - looks reasonable on the surface. But research has shown that couples who live
together before marriage are more likely to experience marriage breakdown than couples who do not
live together before marriage. What many young people fail to realize is that there is a qualitative
difference between committed and uncommitted relationships. In some cases whether or not birth
control is practiced will depend on whether or not a permanent commitment has been made. If a
couple living together only have sex under conditions that make conception impossible, this will
provide them with no evidence as to whether they will be sexually compatible when conception is
possible. And even if the couple do exactly the same things before and after commitment, the
commitment itself changes the way they experience living together. People who are compatible when
living together without commitment may not be compatible once the commitment is made. When a
couple makes a commitment, it means that each of them may exercise rights with regard to the other
that they could not exercise before (for example, the right of an exclusive sexual relationship). No
one can determine whether they are compatible with the way another exercises rights until that other
has those rights. And it is commitment that confers these rights.

It is perhaps too much to expect immature people to understand the fallacy of thinking that living
together will prove compatibility. To the extent that compatibility can be determined before a
commitment is entered into, it can be determined without living together. It may well be in some
cases that the only way the couple will learn that living together does not prove or disprove
compatibility is for them to live together. But if they do not practice birth control and are not
prepared to marry and provide a stable family environment if they have a child, they must ask
themselves whether they are not acting recklessly.

In my experience couples usually do not start living together unless they are in love and moving in
the direction of marriage. Whatever the facts may be, they sincerely believe that living together will
be for each other's good. This belief may be well grounded or it may in error, but it is sincere
and reflects the degree of knowledge and maturity with which they are equipped.

From a psychological point of view, they cannot believe that living together is for each
other's good if they do not see marriage as a desirable outcome of the journey they have
entered on together. Living together would really be a waste of each other's time if they did
not work at making their relationship a marital one.

With this in mind, I propose that the Christian community view a couple who are in love and living
together in the hope that their relationship will end in marriage as "engaged" or "betrothed," whether
or not an engagement has formally been announced. I further propose that sex within that engaged
relationship not be viewed as sinful, so long as the couple practice effective birth control or intend
to marry if they have a child.

Living together before marriage will continue to be the norm as long as society allows young people
to do so without penalty, and society will allow it in every country that achieves a level of
technology and democracy equivalent to the level found today in North America and Western Europe.
For the Church to condemn this social trend will not stop or significantly reduce it. But the Church
can provide guidelines and teaching about loving the person you are living with that young people
can understand and verify on the basis of their life and experience. The Church can help young people
discern their vocation to marriage but only if it makes love the guiding principle of sexual morality
and accepts that moral judgements about the sexual behaviour of people must always take into
account the level of maturity they have reached.

In the next issue of The Journal I will address the question of sexual relations between people of the
same sex.
 

Arthur Menu, Sidney, BC