What about cohabiting before marriage?

Question 12058.

Cohabiting before marriage is now the ordinary route into marriage in Britain, which means that when a couple starts attending church and someone eventually raises it, the conversation arrives with a great deal of embarrassment attached on both sides.

I want to answer the doctrinal question honestly and then spend most of the article on what to actually do about it, because in my experience the second part is where churches get into difficulty.

What is actually wrong with cohabiting before marriage

Let me be precise, because precision helps here. The problem is not sharing an address. Scripture nowhere makes a rule about postcodes. The problem is that in almost every case cohabiting before marriage means a sexual relationship outside marriage, and the New Testament consistently treats that as porneia, sexual immorality, which believers are told to flee.

There is a second problem underneath the first. Cohabitation is a relationship with the privileges of marriage and none of its promises. It offers the intimacy, the shared life and often the children, while keeping the exit door unlocked. That is a structural refusal of covenant, and covenant is precisely what marriage is.

Jesus grounds marriage in creation, that a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh, Matthew 19:5. Leaving, holding fast and becoming one flesh belong together. Cohabitation takes the third without the first two.

Is it not the same thing without the paperwork?

This is the most common objection and it deserves a serious answer rather than a sniff. If two people are committed for life, does a certificate change anything? I would say yes, and for reasons that are not administrative.

A public, witnessed, binding promise changes the nature of a relationship. It moves it from private feeling to public accountability, which is exactly why Scripture treats marriage as a matter for the community and not only for the couple. Every biblical marriage involves witnesses, a household, a public act. There is no such thing as a private wedding in Scripture. See also my answer on biblical marriage.

There is also the plain evidence that it is not the same. Couples who cohabit without a defined commitment separate at markedly higher rates, and one partner very often believes the relationship is more settled than the other does. Ambiguity tends to serve whoever wants less commitment, and that is rarely both people equally.

What Scripture does and does not say

I should be careful not to overclaim. The Bible does not contain a verse about cohabiting before marriage, because the arrangement as we know it is a modern one. What it contains is a clear teaching about sexual union belonging within marriage, and a clear teaching that marriage is a covenant rather than a private arrangement.

Nor does Scripture prescribe a wedding ceremony. Weddings have varied enormously across cultures and centuries, and a Christian marriage does not require a particular liturgy, a church building or a photographer. What it requires is a genuine, public, binding commitment recognised as marriage by the community, which in this country means a legal marriage.

That distinction is useful when talking with a couple who cannot afford what they imagine a wedding must cost. The expense is cultural, not biblical. A registry office and a shared meal is a wedding.

Why the promise is the point

Marriage in Scripture is consistently covenantal language. Malachi calls a man’s wife his companion and his wife by covenant, Malachi 2:14, and the prophets repeatedly use marriage to picture God’s binding commitment to His people. Covenant is not a technicality bolted onto a relationship, it is what makes the relationship what it is.

A covenant is a promise that binds you when you no longer feel like keeping it. That is its whole purpose. Cohabiting before marriage is an arrangement designed to be exited if the feelings change, which means it offers the security of marriage only for as long as security is not actually needed.

This is why I press the point with couples who tell me the paperwork is irrelevant. If it is irrelevant, sign it. The reluctance almost always reveals that both people know it is not irrelevant at all.

Where the church has made this harder

Some of the pressure towards cohabiting before marriage is created by Christians. We have allowed weddings to become extravagant productions costing more than many couples earn in half a year, and then we express surprise when people postpone marrying and move in together instead.

A church that takes this teaching seriously should be visibly willing to marry people cheaply, quickly and joyfully. Provide the hall, provide the cake, provide the witnesses. Make it obvious that a wedding in your congregation costs almost nothing and is celebrated as much as any other.

We should also examine how we talk about it in the pulpit. A congregation where cohabiting couples are referred to with a knowing sigh has told every visitor exactly what would happen if they were honest about their situation. Truth spoken without warmth does not sound like truth to the person hearing it, it sounds like rejection with a verse attached.

When a cohabiting couple starts coming to church

This is where pastoral wisdom is needed and where I have seen real damage done. If two unbelievers who live together start attending, the first priority is the gospel, not their address. They are not disobeying a Lord they do not yet know. Preaching at them about cohabiting before marriage before they have met Jesus gets the order exactly wrong.

Once someone comes to faith, the Spirit generally raises the question Himself, often faster than we expect. My role is usually to help them work out what obedience looks like rather than to inform them that a problem exists. I want to hear what they think Scripture is saying and then walk with them through it.

What I will not do is pretend the question does not exist. That is not kindness. A church that welcomes people warmly and then never mentions anything costly has not respected them; it has decided they cannot handle the truth.

What repentance actually looks like

The options are usually straightforward even when they are hard. The couple can marry, sooner rather than later, and I would help them do that quickly and without fuss. Or they can live separately until they marry. Or, where one is a believer and the other is not, there is a harder conversation about the direction of the whole relationship, since Paul’s caution about being unequally yoked applies with particular force to a couple already cohabiting before marriage, 2 Corinthians 6:14.

Where children, tenancy agreements and finances are involved, the practical difficulties are genuine and a church should be willing to help rather than simply issue instructions. I have known congregations who found a spare room, helped with a deposit, or paid for a registry office wedding. That is what the body of Christ is for, and it turns a demand into an act of love.

Time-limited grace is reasonable, and I would rather give a couple three months and real help than a lecture and nothing. What is not reasonable is an indefinite arrangement where everyone agrees something should change and nothing ever does. My answer on whether sex before marriage is wrong covers the underlying question.

A word to Christians already in this position

If you are a believer currently cohabiting before marriage, I am not writing to shame you. You probably know already, which is why you searched for this. The Spirit’s conviction is not the same as condemnation, and the difference is that conviction always comes with a way forward.

Talk to your partner honestly. Talk to a pastor or an older believer who will help rather than lecture. Then act, because the longer this sits the more reasons will accumulate for leaving it as it is. And when it is dealt with, it is dealt with. There is no lingering second-class status in the church of Jesus for people who have repented of anything.

So, now what?

If this is your situation, set a date this week for the conversation you have been avoiding. Not a decision necessarily, just the conversation. Most people find the anticipation harder than the thing itself.

If you are in leadership, ask whether your church is genuinely a place where someone could raise cohabiting before marriage without fear of being made an example. And ask whether you have made marriage easy to enter for people without money, because if we insist on the standard we ought to remove the obstacles we invented ourselves.

Is there anything in your life at present that you would rather the Lord did not ask you about, and how long has it been sitting there?

Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.

Hebrews 13:4, ESV