We tumbled into bed without thinking

It seemed like the natural thing to do when I met Lousia - we fell in love, stumbled into a relationship, tumbled into bed, became inseperable, and moved in together without thinking. I recall having a feeling of foreboding when we were arriving back at the university town to start our first year of living dangerously together. The pain and anguish we engineered for each other in the coming 4 years before we married and the ongoing tension that took our marriage to breaking point so many times - well, perhaps it could have been avoided if we'd played by the rules a little more. You see, no one knew it at the time, but cohabiting is a bad way to start a marriage if you want your marriage to last.
Look at the facts. In the past 20 years the percentage of couples that live together before marrying has jumped from 30% to 70%. Yet these days divorce rates are up. Divorce is more likely than ever before. The odds of your marriage surviving are slimmer. Why is it so? Isn't the reason you have a 'trial marriage', ie. live together, to test the relationship before signing on the dotted line? Don't we shack up first as an insurance policy against getting it wrong?
The statistics tell us that living together has the opposite effect - it makes marriages less secure, and I now know why. Just last week Louisa, Daniel and I did a personality test as part of the local Catchment Management Authority's Farm Systems Project. (See my blog for our farm http://envirofarming.blogspot.com). The Hermann Brain Dominance Indicator divided the group of 11 farmers (selected for training for their progressive farm practices) into 4 types: Blue - analyses, likes technical/financial accuracy, logical, asks 'what are the facts?'; Green - organises, likes to follow procedures, reliable, asks 'what is the sequence of events?'; Yellow - strategises, likes to conceptualise, imaginitive, asks 'how can the parts be put together?'; and Red - personalises, likes to know the effect on others, supportive, asks 'who's involved?' Now no one is simply all one colour. We are combinations of colours, and these combinations can be mapped. Just as an aside the facilitator mentioned that people who live together (cohabit) tend to have similar patterns (ie. the same personality characteristics or colour combinations) and people who follow the traditional route into marriage tend to have the opposite - that is, couples who fall in love and decide to shack up tend to have a lot in common and think that's the basis for an enduring relationship. But couples thinking seriously about spending the rest of their lives together must think about compensating characteristics in each other - how one's strengths will compensate for the other's weaknesses and vice versa. [Just imagine it: A messy, creative person living with another messy, creative person is fun at first, but then the trouble begins. An organiser living with an organiser will have no one to organise.] So are marriages that start with shacking up (like mine) doomed? No. But they require greater skills and patience with each other - and the road is likely to be rockier. (And it was.)