[dash2]

Sure. I'll also show you how, so you could do this yourself in future.

I googled "stability of cohabiting couples". This led me to Wikipedia [1]. From there I hit the 2002 CDC report "Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage in the United States" [2]. That provides the following statistic:

"The probability of a first marriage ending in separation or divorce within 5 years is 20 percent, but the probability of a premarital cohabitation breaking up within 5 years is 49 percent. After 10 years, the probability of a first marriage ending is 33 percent, compared with 62 percent for cohabitations."

I wondered if that had changed since 2002, so I hit Google Scholar and searched for articles after 2010. A 2020 article discussed cohabitation broadly. I scrolled down and found a 2018 article [3]. (There's an ungated PDF elsewhere if you need it.) They look at 8 countries including the US. Their findings: "cohabiting couples who do not subsequently transition to marriage... consistently have the highest predicted probabilities of separation within 5 years." Some of the gaps between cohabiting and married couples disappear if you control for (e.g.) education and other demographics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohabitation#Likelihood_of_spl... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/02news/div_mar_cohab.htm [3] https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/55/4/1389/167...

[Shocka1]

It's puzzling to me that you are getting downvoted instead of responses when it seems like your comment follows the whole progressive comment Hacker News thing... Or whatever it is they are going for this week.