English for FRIENDS - FRIENDS"CLUB ( the 5th floor)

Some references for U to well prepare for the topic in this coming Thursday...
The Costs of Cohabitation - Shane Doré
[Shane Doré is a member of the AFA State Executive in Queensland and is a recent graduate (BA) in psychology.]
The sharp rise in unmarried cohabitation is perhaps one of the most alarming trends of the Australian family this century. By way of definition, unmarried cohabitation* is the status reserved for couples who are ***ual partners, not married to each other, and who share a household prior to or instead of marriage. The question of why we should or shouldn''t live together before or instead of marriage is by no means new.
Who''s Cohabiting?
Of those married in 1976, approximately 16 percent had cohabited prior to marriage. By 1992 this proportion had increased dramatically to 56 percent. According to the 1996 Census of Population and Housing, 10 percent of all couple relationships are de facto relationships, up from 8 percent at the 1991 Census.
According to Australian Bureau of Statistics estimations, the number of people in de facto relationships in 1999 has increased and exceeded 10 percent of all couple relationships.
Young people are more likely to form de facto relationships than older people are. Seventy-four percent of relationships with at least one partner aged less than 20 years, 38 percent with one partner in their early twenties, and 18 percent with one partner in their late twenties are de facto relationships. Of those in de facto relationships 67 percent have never married, 24 percent divorced, 8 percent married and separated, and 2 percent widowed.
Why Live Together?
The reasons that couples choose to live together before or instead of matrimony vary. For some, cohabitation is seen as an alternative to marriage. This decision may be based on negative views on the institution of marriage, or the desire to keep love ''alive'' by avoiding the security of marriage. Cohabitation may also be the extension of an affectionate, steady relationship which includes being ***ually intimate. It is likely to continue as long as the couple enjoy being together. Lastly, cohabitation may be a ''trial marriage'' for couples who are contemplating making their relationship permanent and want to test it out. In this sense, living together becomes part of the courtship.
How Long Do Cohabiting Relationships Last?
Most cohabitations are short-lived and in fact some studies suggest that 60 percent of cohabiters eventually opt for marriage instead. Forty percent of all cohabiting couples either marry or stop living together within 12 months; less than 30 percent are still cohabiting after 2 years; and less than 2 percent are cohabiting after 10 years.
Sarantakos explored the reasons couples abandon cohabitation and enter matrimony. A significant proportion of respondents (76 percent) abandoned cohabitation because "they no longer believed in it"; over 85 percent thought there was "no future or real purpose in cohabitation" or "no real differences between marriage and cohabitation"; and almost three quarters found that cohabitation was a barrier to the "fulfilment of their deep personal need to settle down".
Cohabitation, Marriage and Divorce: Is There A Link?
According to Lillard, Brien and Waite, the key to marital stability is obtaining information about the potential spouse and about the kind of life which marriage to that person would entail. Premarital cohabitation may serve as a ''screening'' function. This selection process should mean that only the best-matched couples will turn their cohabitations into marriages, and that these couples should have even more stable marriages than couples who never cohabited. According to this reasoning, cohabitation weeds out unsuitable partners through a process of natural "de-selection". Over time and perhaps after several living-together relationships, it is thought that a person will eventually find a marriageable mate.
However, contrary to the expectations of many couples who perceive cohabiting before marriage as a safeguard against marital failure, the evidence to date strongly suggests the opposite: couples who cohabit before marriage are ending their marriages at significantly higher rates than couples who never lived together before the wedding.
The Australian Institute of Family Studies'' Australian Family Formation Study found that after five years of marriage, 13 percent of those who had cohabited prior to marriage would divorce, compared to 6 percent of those who had not cohabited. After ten years, the proportions were 26 percent for those who had cohabited and 14 percent for those who had not. After 20 years of marriage it is estimated that 56 percent of marriages of ''cohabiters'' will have ended in divorce compared to 27 percent of those where partners did not cohabit prior to marriage. According to DeMaris and Rao, "it appears that this association (between cohabitation and later marital disruption) is beginning to take on the status of an empirical generalisation".
Bennett, Blanc and Bloom argue that the relationship between cohabitation and later marital disruption results from selectivity. Couples who cohabit do so at least in part because they have less commitment to the institution of marriage or relationship permanency than couples who marry without cohabiting beforehand. Couples who cohabit are more willing to end an unsatisfactory relationship, and less willing to make a relationship work than married couples. Nock also found that there were consistent differences in the level of commitment between cohabiting and married couples: cohabiting couples were found to be significantly less committed than their married counterparts.
The experience of cohabiting may change people''s views of marriage, making them less strongly committed to relationship permanency and more willing to divorce. This change in commitment to marriage as an institution may decrease marital stability even though living together, through improved information about the quality of the match, may increase it. Bennett et al. argue that the stability of a marriage may depend on how long it takes couples to move from living together to marriage. Previous research has shown that the disruption of a marriage preceded by cohabitation becomes more likely as the length of cohabitation increases.
Couples who cohabit for lengthy periods of time may develop individualistic modes of behaviour which are incompatible with roles in marriage. Of particular concern to researchers is ''serial'' cohabitation. DeMaris and McDonald claim that the experience of dissolving a cohabiting relationship generates a greater willingness to dissolve later relationships, be they cohabitations or marriages. With serial cohabitation, a person''s tolerance for unhappiness or adversity in relationships is diminished, resulting in the breakdown of a relationship that might have otherwise been salvaged.
Research has shown that there is a widespread belief that cohabitation is a ''liberating'' lifestyle. Cohabitation is thought to help express criticism of, dissatisfaction with and liberation from the tra***ional cultural constraints, particularly regarding supposed ***ist, discriminating and oppressive family structures. This ideological trend is not something new. The media and various interests groups have been promoting for some time the idea of cohabitation as the ''sensible'' alternative to the tra***ional marriage. Cohabitation is promoted as a liberal lifestyle that will free people from the established tra***ions and conventions, and help eradicate supposed discriminatory and oppressive standards and practices.
However, according to Sarantakos, this is no longer true because cohabitation is no longer based on the free will and complete independence which constituted its essence in the past. In his review of legal theory and practice in 22 countries, Sarantakos maintains that the commonly held belief about freedom from state interference and legal commitment of the cohabitants to each other, and liberation or freedom from the tra***ional cultural constraints in de facto unions, is inaccurate.
According to Sarantakos, the institutionalisation of cohabitation has transformed de facto relationships into a new form of ''marriage''. Most countries, including Australia, now recognise cohabitation directly or indirectly, and living together creates certain rights and obligations, which in certain cases, are as committing as the rights and obligations of married persons. Cohabitation has thus become a new form of marriage, at least in its structure and consequences, and says Sarantakos, "living together has gradually become a way of getting married - unknowingly and unwillingly".
Why Cohabitation Fails
Cohabiting relationships often fail to function effectively because of several reasons. Perhaps one of the most frequently cited reasons for the failure of cohabiting relationships is that, while marriages tend to be held together by a strong ethic of commitment, cohabiting relationships by their very nature tend to undercut this ethic. The enforced intimacy of marriage or stronger social sanctions associated with deviations from tra***ion in marriage explain, in part, the greater commitment required.
The relationship between a married couple is harder to dissolve, not just legally, but also because it is supported by stronger social norms than is true for cohabiting couples. Married couples are more likely to resolve their problems or at least arrive at acceptable compromises compared to their cohabiting counterparts whose low-commitment, highly-autonomous relationships are often terminated in times of adversity.
Sarantakos claims that the cohabiting lifestyle attracts people with little, if any, resources, skills and attributes that are required for a successful relationship. Booth and Johnson found some evidence that cohabiters bring characteristics to the relationship which make them poor marriage material, or who are at least more critical in their evaluations of their relationships at the outset. These characteristics include personality problems, alcohol or drug abuse, financial irresponsibility, problems with the law, and unstable employment patterns.
Researchers have also found other important differences between cohabiting and married couples. Cohabiting couples report lower levels of relationship happiness than married couples, have significantly lower levels of dyadic interaction, and higher levels of disagreement and instability than their married counterparts. Some researchers have attributed this instability to the probable selectivity of cohabitation: that is, those who eschew tra***ion are less committed to more tra***ional lifestyles.
Cohabiting couples are less likely to pool their resources; tend to be less religious and of non-religious family backgrounds; and are more likely to have come from a family of origin where parents divorced or separated. Rates of depression among cohabiting couples are more than three times what they are among married couples, and cohabiting couples report poorer relationships with both mothers and fathers than married individuals.
Cohabitation, Women and Children
One disturbing finding is that women in cohabiting relationships are more likely than women in marriages to be victims of physical and ***ual abuse. Evidence reveals that aggression is at least twice as common among cohabiting couples than it is among married couples. Researchers have suggested that the inflated rate of aggression can be explained in part by the lack of social support or social control.
It is also possible that couples enter cohabitation rather than marriage to keep more of their own independence, only to find that arguments frequently arise over rights, duties, and obligations which may lead to conflict and violence. Ad***ionally, the very nature of being in a less committed relationship may create its own dynamics for aggression. The costs or losses associated with being aggressive may not be as great for cohabiters compared to marrieds.
Perhaps the most worrying trend in cohabiting relationships is the occurrence of child abuse. According to the latest national Australian statistics for child abuse and neglect, there were 29,833 substantiated claims of child abuse and neglect for children aged 18 years and under in the year 1995-1996. Step-parents and a parent''s de facto partner were believed responsible in 17 percent of substantiated cases.
The over-representation of step-parents or de facto parents as perpetrators was clearest in cases of ***ual abuse, where 24 percent of cases were reported to involve a step-parent or de facto partner. In the United Kingdom, Whelan examined the relationship between child abuse and family structure and found that, compared to children living with their married biological parents, children living with cohabiting but unmarried biological parents were 20 times more likely to be subject to child abuse. Whelan found that this risk increases 33 times for children living with a biological mother and a cohabiting boyfriend who is not the biological father.
A study by Margolin found that mothers'' boyfriends are responsible for substantially more child abuse than any other nonparental caregiver. Margolin found that 84% of observed nonparental abuse occurred in single-parent families, with 64% of this abuse committed by mothers'' boyfriends. Consistent with other research the most unsafe of all family environments for children is the one in which the mother is living with someone other than the child''s biological father.
Cohabitation is a relationship by definition that is neither committed nor stable. During selection men and women look for a "partner", not a "spouse", and therefore do not apply the appropriate selection mechanisms. Schoen and Weinick found that partner-choice criteria differ between cohabiting relationships and marriages, suggesting that "a different kind of relationship calls for a different kind of partner".
To some extent, cohabitation''s ''advantage'' over marriage is that it guarantees free entry and free exit, no commitment and no responsibility. In fact, Nock found that cohabiting couples report that ending their relationship would have more positive and/or fewer negative consequences than would be true for married couples.
The Role Of Governments, The Academia And The Media
A review of the literature on cohabitation and marriage would be incomplete without reference to the role played by the academia, governments and media. In her submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs'' report of the inquiry into aspects of family services - To Have and to Hold - Moira Eastman declared that one of the most important contributing factors to marriage breakdown is the ambivalence, and even hostility, towards the concept of marriage, especially in sections of the academia, government and the media. Opponents of marriage often portray marriage as an "outdated" institution; that it is a "hitting" licence; argue that violence and abuse are typical within marriage; and that marriage was originally designed to facilitate both the maintenance of class inequality and the oppression of women.
The evidence *****pport these negative beliefs about marriage does not exist, according to Eastman, and the evidence to refute them is very strong and constantly growing. The movement to ''deconstruct'' marriage and to legally sanction alternative relationships has implications for society that are far different from those imagined by advocates of such alternative relationships such as unmarried cohabitation. Still, the prevalence of these negative views of marriage needs to be taken into account. Governments must understand that there are scholarly critiques of these views and, on the basis of these views, implement policies that support marriages as an essential component not only of family life but of society as well. Failure to do this, says Eastman, will result in cultural forces overwhelming any purely educative approach that may be developed to combat the growing number of people cohabiting before or instead of marriage.
Why Marriage?
The advantages of marriage are substantial. Only marriage has the implicit long-term contract. Despite being weakened by the availability of no-fault divorce, marriage is a durable commitment embodied in matrimonial law. Married couples have a greater sharing of economic and social resources, and have a better connection to the larger community. Compared to cohabiting couples, married couples are less likely to stress the importance of individual freedom within marriage; expect to have more children; express more commitment to an ideal of marital permanence; and are more attached to the principle of marital ***ual fidelity.
Cohabitation is an incomplete institution and its growth will further damage marriage as an institution. According to Popenoe and Whitehead, "the practice of cohabitation, far from being a friend of marriage, looks more like its enemy." With all of the available empirical evidence, not forgetting to mention the wisdom of our forebears, the institution of marriage still remains the cornerstone of a successful society.
Conclusion
The purpose of this paper has been to provide a comprehensive review of the literature on unmarried cohabitation. This paper has endeavoured to (1) outline recent statistics in regard to cohabitation; (2) examine the determinants of cohabitation; (3) summarise important differences between cohabitation and marriage; and (4) examine the benefits of marriage. Despite the widespread acceptance of and increase in cohabiting relationships, the growing body of empirical research suggests that unmarried cohabitation is an unstable system. It is, for the most part, not a relationship with a future, says Nock, but one that lasts for a period of time, and then ends. Cohabitation does not improve the choice of marital partners, nor does it offer an enriched courtship where partners can get to know each other and gain experience with matters related to marriage.
It seems that there are more couples with (as opposed to without) cohabitation experience demonstrating low relationship satisfaction and low relationship happiness, a lack of freedom, increased interpersonal dependence, domestic violence, marital conflicts and instability. People are misguided about life in cohabitation and choose to live together not only with the wrong person but also for the wrong reasons. Only marriage offers that implicit long-term contract. Cohabitation''s only advantage over marriage is that it guarantees free entry, free exit, no commitment, and no responsibility - hardly the ingredients for long-term and enduring interpersonal relationships.
* The terms ''unmarried cohabitation'', ''cohabitation'', ''cohabit'', ''cohabiting'', ''defacto marriage'', ''defacto relationship'', and ''unmarrieds'' are used interchangeably in this paper. Despite the lack of adherence to strict terminology, all of these terms denote the same thing - couples who are ***ual partners, not married to each other, and who share a household prior to marriage or instead of marriage.
(Note: References are available upon request.)
Read full version here: http://www.family.org.au/Journals/2000/cohabitation.htm

Some ideas abt differences between premarital cohabitation vs marriage...: http://www.google.com.vn/search?hl=vi&q=different+ideas+about+cohabitation&meta=
Views on Pre-Marriage Cohabitation: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/674565/views_on_premarriage_cohabitation.html?cat=41
There are lots more articles discussing abt this topic, you can search/ google for more information!

​

Looks like we made it
Look how far we''ve come my baby
We might''ve took the long way
But we knew we''d get there some day
They said, I''ll bet
They''ll never make it
But just look at us holding on
We''re still together still going strong
Because you''re still the one
Still the one I run to
The one that I belong to(still the one)
Still the one I want for life
You''re still the one
Still the one that I love
The only one I dream of(still the one)
Still the one still the one I kiss goodnight
Ain''t nothing better
We beat the odds together
Im glad we didn''t listen
Look at what we could be missing
They said well I bet
We''ll never make it
But just look at us holding on
We''re still together still going strong
Because you''re still the one
Still the one I run to
The one that I belong to(still the one)
You''re still the one I want for life
You''re still the one
Still the one that I love
The only one I dream of(still the one)
Still the one still the one I kiss goodnight
You''re still the one
Still the one I run to
The one that I belong to(still the one)
You''re still the one I want for life
You''re still the one
Still the one that I love
The only I dream of(still the one)
Still the one still the one I kiss goodnight
// i like the way she sit and her guitar is nice...

Thank FsClub so much for what you have provided.
Debate this week is - let me repeat one more time:
Should or shouldn''t young couples cohabit?
Two points we need to make clear about this debate:
1. This debate is about young couples - young lovers, not the older ones. Let us say their age is between 18-25. So, don''t forget it, pals. Between 18-25.
2. To cobahit is to live together, in the same house and have a ***ual reltionship, like husband & wife, without marriage. So this is not only about having a ***ual relationship but living together. Don''t forget this, neither.

So, how to run this debate?
First, debate within groups:
- Everyone is free to choose *****pport cohabitation or not. Reasons need to be given to explain why you do that.
Second, debate in whole club:
- All members are divided into two sides of supporters and opposers. One point by one point, each side says why they support or oppose cohabitation. The other side has to give ideas to fight back. When moderator - me - thinks there are no new or valuable ideas for the current point, he will recommend both sides to move to the next point.
Third, conclusion.
- Moderator considers all points which have been given by both side and gives marks. Side with more marks, of course wins.

Sau buổi off, có j các bác zai ở lại bàn chút chuyện nhé. chừng 10p thôi

Ông này lại bàn linh tinh cái gì thì cứ ở lại 1 mình đi. Toàn tung tin vịt. Mà bàn cái gì bàn 10 phút thì bàn ra cái gì?

20/10 ... 10P LÀ ĐỦ RỒI MÀ

Ờ, các vụ ăn chơi tiệc tùng vui chơi đàn đúm thì nhường các em trẻ, tớ xin phép đứng ngoài. Già rồi, ko đủ sức đu dây nữa. Các bạn thông cảm

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