(Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain mistakes.)

Hi, this is Pastor Roger Jimenez from Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, California. Today I'm making a video to answer the question, are you more likely to get a divorce if you don't live together before marriage? Today, most people believe that living together before marriage will help you have a more successful marriage that is less likely to end up with a divorce. The reason they believe that is because they think that if you live together before you get married, you can decide whether you're compatible with that individual, whether that's someone you want to live with for the rest of your life. However, studies done by clinical psychologists have found that the exact opposite is true. Lauren Fox in an article entitled The Science of Cohabitation wrote, since the 1970s, study after study found that living together before marriage could undercut a couple's future happiness and ultimately lead to divorce. On average, researchers concluded that couples who lived together before they tied the knot saw a 33% higher rate of divorce than those who waited to live together until after they were married. Part of the problem was that cohabiters, studies suggested, slid into marriage without much consideration. Instead of making a conscious decision to share an entire life together, couples who shared a dog, a dresser, a blender, were picking marriage over the inconvenience of breaking up. Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist, outlined the cohabitation effect in a widely circulated New York Times op-ed in 2012. Because couples who shack up together or live together get comfortable over many years, they usually end up getting married because of the fact that they've been living together for so long, but they never actually came to the place where they had to make a purposeful decision whether they were choosing this individual as their spouse for life. The Bible explicitly forbids fornication, which is having a physical relationship with someone before marriage. In 1 Corinthians 6 13, the Bible says this, Meats for the belly and belly for meats, but God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. In 1 Corinthians 6 18, the Bible says this, Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body, but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. Today you have many Christians who will say, well, I'm going to go ahead and move in with my girlfriend, or I'm going to go ahead and move in with my boyfriend, but we're not going to fornicate. Let me just say this, nobody believes that. If you are in a romantic relationship with someone and you're living together, you will end up fornicating, therefore you're living in fornication. You often hear, in fact, of couples who lived in fornication for years and when they finally decided to get married, then they ended up getting divorced shortly after that. You say, well, why is that the case? You know, I believe that the reason for that is because Galatians 6 7 says this, Be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. The Bible says that you're not going to mock at the laws of God. And when you sow into a bad relationship for years and years and years, you will eventually reap a bad relationship because of what you've sowed in the past. When studies show that couples who live together are more likely to end up divorced, this is yet one more example that the Bible had it right all along. If you like these videos, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. And if you have an idea of a video that we could make, maybe something going on in the current events or a biblical question that we can answer, make sure you leave your idea in the comments below. Hope that was helpful. Thanks for watching.