Is It Wrong to Live Together Before Marriage?

The short answer: The Bible keeps sex and a shared life for marriage, so living together as a couple before marriage isn’t God’s way. That isn’t because God is fussy about paperwork, but because marriage is a promise, and love grows safest inside a promise. Many good people live together, though, and Christians should never look down on them.

Lots of couples live together now before they marry, or instead of marrying. It may be what your older brother or sister did, or your friends’ parents, or even your own. On TV it’s simply normal. So when a Christian says, “Wait until you’re married,” it can sound old-fashioned or even unkind.

Let’s take the main objections one at a time.

“It’s just a piece of paper”

A wedding certificate is a piece of paper. A marriage is not. In the Bible, marriage is a covenant, a solemn promise made in front of God and other people. The prophet Malachi describes a wife as “your companion and your wife by covenant,” and says “the LORD has been a witness between you” (Malachi 2:14). Proverbs talks about “the covenant of her God” (Proverbs 2:17). God takes the promise so seriously that He calls Himself its witness.

That’s the heart of it. Marriage says, “I’m giving you my whole life, for the rest of my life, and I’m saying so in front of everyone.” Living together says, in effect, “I’m giving you my life, for now.” Even when the love is real, the promise isn’t there yet.

“We need to see if we’re compatible”

It sounds sensible: you’d test-drive a car, so why not test-drive a relationship? But people aren’t cars. A trial says, “I’ll keep you if you pass.” Love in the Bible says something very different: love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). You can’t test someone for that. You can only promise it.

You get to know whether someone is right for you by spending time together, meeting each other’s families, serving alongside each other, watching how they handle stress and money, and asking wise people what they see. None of that needs a shared bedroom.

“We love each other”

That may be completely true. But feelings, however strong, aren’t enough to hold a life together. Sometimes love feels like the strongest thing in the world: “Set me as a seal over your heart... For love is as strong as death” (Song of Solomon 8:6). Even so, a seal is a mark of something sealed and settled. Feelings rise and fall; a promise holds you when they fall.

And if a couple is living together, they are almost always sharing a bed too. The Bible is clear that sex belongs within marriage (Book 1 looked at why). Paul writes that “it is God’s will that you should be holy: You must abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Thessalonians 4:3). Paul is surprisingly practical about this. To people struggling with desire he doesn’t say, “Move in together.” He says, “it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (1 Corinthians 7:9). In other words, if you’re serious, make the promise.

What God’s way protects

God’s way protects both people. When one person in a couple living together wants to leave, the other can lose a home, a shared life and sometimes contact with children, all without any promise having been broken, because none was made. Marriage doesn’t make people perfect, but it says out loud, “I am not going anywhere.”

If this is your family

Maybe your mum and her partner live together, or your dad and his. This chapter isn’t an attack on them, and it doesn’t give you the right to lecture them. Love them and honour them. Many people who live together are kind, faithful and doing their best, and many have never heard why God’s way is different. Your job isn’t to judge anyone. It’s to understand God’s design so that when your own time comes, you can choose it gladly, and to show the people you love what Jesus is like.

Think about it: Why do you think a promise made in front of other people might change a relationship, even when the feelings are the same?

Go deeper: The Key Teachings of C. S. Lewis — Lewis’s The Four Loves calls romantic love one of God’s good gifts, meant to find its fulfilment in marriage, but warns that feeling alone cannot keep the vows it inspires and must be held up by commitment, faithfulness and God’s own love. Start with chapter 13, “The Four Loves”.