by Kriszia Vengua

Created on: January 26, 2009   Last Updated: March 26, 2011

Think about it: you can test drive a car, so why not test drive a relationship?

Magazines come with 30 day trials, awesome return policies for electronics, and free samples for ice cream, so why can't we get the same money back guarantee with our relationships?

The reaity, is we do. They are called live-in relationships. It's a brilliant idea that makes perfect sense but unfortunately it doesn't work.

That's because by and large, married couples and those who live together both want the same things: commitment. The idea of sharing the rest of your life with someone, with all it's ups and downs, is what makes being in a relationship so rewarding. Something which living together doesn't quite lend itself to.

Successful partnerships are built on a series of compromises, a practice that is severely undermined when your only intention is to stay with that person as long as they keep you happy. It's not that marriages are meant to be unhappy, but that they realize that happiness is fleeting. It comes and it goes.

Beyond the signed documents, marriage forces you to look at the long term. The trials and tribulations; children and schooling, sharing financial burdens, and not just the cooking and cleaning. When you think of the rest of your life, you're more than willing to make sacrifices in order to stay together. If putting the toilet seat up is an argument that's likely to occur for the rest of your married life, then you might learn to just put it down yourself...then back up after you've used it. Likewise, if doing a bit more of the chores is going to keep her from whining for the next fifty years, then you'd be more inclined to do the dishes. Especially when the resulting act could be a very expensive divorce.

This doesn't happen as much with live-in couples. When you're living together, your concern isn't with what's good for your marriage, it's what's good for yourself. You're searching for something that's going to suit you, which is pretty much what you're doing when you test drive a car. How it feels when you drive it, how it suits your lifestyle, and services your current needs.

The problem, is that people aren't cars, in the same way they aren't magazines or free samples. That car will still behave like a car from the moment you take it for a test spin to the time it hits the junk yard. A magazine will still have the same content even after your 30 day trial. In the same way that ice cream will never change whether or not your tried the sampler.

People aren't as predictable. How they are in the first three years won't be the same as the next ten or twenty. So when your idea of "for better or worse" changes into "only for the better," then you likely won't stay around for when things get better, after fighting through the worse.

The idea of being with a person day in and day out so you will know what they are like in a marriage doesn't work. You can only know what it is like to be married to someone when you actually are married to them, that's why less than 50% of live-in couples make it to the altar. And those that do, are more than likely to divorce. They notice that marriage is extremely different from living together, after knowing what it really is like to face a lifelong commitment. That's why most struggle to even make it past the seven year itch.

The average live-in rate is two years. If you're willing to go through life testing one live-in relationship after another, then you might one day discover that it's too late. So instead of settling for a string of fake commitments, why not bite the bullet and for once, try the real thing.

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