Stephanie Coontz: "Marriages require much more maturity than they once did."

For decades, academics and social scientists have claimed that couples who live together before getting married face a higher risk of divorce. But it's just not true, says Arielle Kuperberg an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro.

"Cohabitation does not cause divorce — yay!" she told LiveScience.com, adding the exclamation because about two-thirds of new marriages in the United States today start with shacking up....

Indeed, other research released by the Council on Contemporary Families suggests that the longer couples wait to start living together, the better their chances for long-term relationship success. This makes sense to historian Stephanie Coontz, the council's director of research and public education.

"Marriages require much more maturity than they once did," she says. In the 1950s, husbands and wives stepped into well-defined gender roles. "Nowadays, people come to marriage with independent aspirations and much greater ideas of equality. Maturity is so important, and negotiating skills are so much more important."...