The study, produced
by the Jubilee Centre in the UK, found that couples who have lived with each
other were 15 percent more likely to get divorced
than those who didn’t first live together.

And couples who have
previously lived with a different partner before getting married are around 45
percent more likely to divorce.

According to the
report, more couples are cohabiting than ever before – with the average
time spent living together before tying the
knot doubling to three-and-a-half years in the past four
decades.

Separation rates for
cohabitees and married couples are significantly different for couples with
children, according to the report.

Cohabiting
couples
are six times more likely to split by the time their first child is five compared with married couples. By the time the
child is 16, the separation rate for cohabiting couples is still four times as
high as for couples who marry.

The report said that
living together had become ‘a more fragile state of relationship than ever
before’.

The study’s author’s
Dr John Hayward and Dr Guy Brandon said: ‘Despite the popularity of cohabitation
and its relationship to marriage, it is also the case that marriages that start
with a period of prior cohabitation are significantly more prone to divorce than
those that do not.

‘Where there has been
a previous cohabitation with a separate person by one of both partners, the
likelihood of divorce soars.’

According to the
report, the average age of first cohabitation in the UK today is about the same
as the average age of first marriage thirty years ago: at 23 years for women and
25 years for men.

More couples are
cohabiting for longer, with the median duration rising from 2½ years to 3½ years
between the 1980s and early 2000s.

Mean lengths of
cohabitation have roughly doubled over 40 years. However, fewer than 1-in-4
couples cohabit for more than 6½ years and even fewer couples now cohabit for
very long periods of time before they separate or get
married.

The number of couples
who have gotten married without first
cohabiting has gone from nearly 100 per cent in 1970 to 15 per
cent.

The data was based on
14,103 households and 22,265 adults.

The research follows
on from the think-tank’s 2010 publication ‘Cohabitation in the 21st Century’, which showed the cost of family breakdown is
£41.7billion.

This is equivalent to
£1,350 for every taxpayer each year.

It claimed these
costs will rise ‘significantly’ over the next 25 years, with its analysis based
on almost 30,000 family cases drawn from a nationwide
survey.