So today I want to talk about a touchy subject, and that is how to handle conflict or how to have hard conversations with your spouse or partner.

But first, I want to make a quick comment about a response I got to my episode on cohabitation, which if you scroll down is just a few

weeks ago. It was from a father who said he, quote unquote, normally agrees with me,

but that his son and his girlfriend lived together for seven years before they got married at

age 35 and couldn't be happier.

So I'm calling this out, not him in particular, but I've heard this so many times over the years where I make an argument about something or I'll use research to explain why I'm making the argument.

And someone will respond with, well, I knew someone who, or, well, that doesn't apply to me,

thereby assuming that that undoes my argument, which I always laugh, because of course,

it doesn't.

And I'm always surprised that people don't realize that one story or isolated stories,

that they don't realize that that doesn't undo the research.

So what we know about premarital cohabitation is that it is absolutely associated with greater odds of divorce.

This is from the Wall Street Journal.

Quote, in analyzing reports of marriage and divorce rates from more than 50,000 women in the U.S. government's national survey of family growth,

we found that there's a group of women for whom marriage before 30 is not risky.

Women who married without ever cohabiting prior to marriage.

In fact, women who married between 22 and 30 without first living together had some of the lowest rates of divorce in the NSFG.

That's what I mentioned before, the National Survey of Family Growth.

So, yeah, I just, I want to throw that out there in case anybody else has the, had the

thought that, well, I know somebody who, and it applies to them, I mean, and what I'm said, it does not apply to them.

That's great.

There's always going to be exceptions to the rule, but there's still a rule, and that's what data show.

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