Sliding vs. Deciding: Why How You Got Here Matters
I ask a lot of couples how they ended up living together, or engaged, or committed to each other for the long haul. What surprises me is how often the honest answer is some version of “it just kind of happened.” A lease was ending. A move made sense. Everyone assumed it was next. Nobody remembers a moment where they actually sat down and decided.
There’s real research behind why that matters. Researchers Scott Stanley, Galena Rhoades, and Howard Markman studied this pattern and gave it a name: inertia. Their finding was that many couples don’t make a deliberate decision to move toward deeper commitment — they slide into it, carried along by convenience and momentum rather than a clear, mutual choice (Stanley, Rhoades, & Markman, 2006). And once you’ve moved in together, or merged your lives in practical ways, it becomes harder to leave even if the relationship isn’t actually right — not because you’re more committed, but because you’re more stuck. The research is careful to separate those two things: constraint isn’t the same as dedication, even though it can feel like it from the inside.
That’s not a knock on cohabiting or on couples who build a life together outside of a traditional marriage. It’s simply an observation about how decisions get made — and it turns out that couples who arrive at commitment on purpose, having actually talked about what it means and where they’re headed, tend to do better than couples who arrive there by drift.
This is exactly why I call it precommitment counseling too
I don’t only work with couples heading toward a wedding. I work with couples who’ve chosen — deliberately, on purpose — to build a committed life together without a marriage license being part of that picture. That choice deserves the same intentionality, the same conversations, the same tools as a traditional engagement. If anything, naming your commitment out loud matters more when there’s no ceremony automatically prompting the conversation for you.
So whether you’re engaged, already living together, or building something committed without plans to marry, the questions worth asking on purpose are the same ones the “sliding” couples skipped:
- Did we ever actually talk about what this next step means to each of us, or did it just happen?
- Do we agree on what commitment looks like day to day — not just how we feel, but what we’ve decided?
- If a practical constraint (a lease, a pet, finances) disappeared tomorrow, would we still choose each other?
- What are we building toward, and have we said it out loud to each other?
The couples who do best are the ones who decide on purpose, not the ones who just let it happen.
Deciding is the whole point
None of this means cohabiting before marriage — or instead of marriage — is a mistake. It means the couples who do best are the ones who turn the sliding into a deciding, somewhere along the way, on purpose. That’s really all premarital or precommitment counseling is: a space to stop and actually decide, together, instead of letting momentum decide for you.
Wherever You’re Starting From
If any of this resonated — whether you’re engaged, dating and thinking long-term, already building a life together, or newly married — I’d love to help you build it well, together.
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Sources
- Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sliding versus deciding: Inertia and the premarital cohabitation effect. Family Relations, 55(4), 499–509.
Next in this series: The Secrets That Quietly Break Marriages — And Why They Belong in This Work Early →