Couples who slide into marriage decide less and regret more
The path into a marriage predicts its odds almost as much as the marriage itself.
In 2006, psychologists Scott Stanley, Galena Rhoades, and Howard Markman proposed a distinction that reframed decades of confusing research on cohabitation: sliding versus deciding. Some couples move in together, and eventually marry, through a series of small conveniences — a lease ending, a long commute, a shared dog — with no single moment where either person weighed the relationship and chose it. Others treat cohabitation, engagement, and marriage as actual decisions, made deliberately, each one examined before the next.
The sliders aren't choosing worse partners. They're avoiding the friction of choosing at all, and inertia does the rest — once you've merged a lease and a lot of furniture, breaking up costs more than staying does, regardless of how the relationship is actually going. That's the trap: the practical entanglement quietly outruns the emotional certainty, and by the time a wedding gets discussed, leaving has become the harder option on paper, whatever it is in the heart.
Couples who marry after explicit, examined decisions at each stage report higher marital quality than those who arrived at the same address by drifting. The researchers' policy suggestion was almost embarrassingly simple: before any major relationship transition, stop and actually decide, out loud, rather than let the lease decide for you.