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Jun. 20th, 2013 01:47 pmI remember when I was very small, maybe six, we went camping on Lake Okanagan. The campground was mostly families with young kids and older couples, and everybody was frenetically sociable. But there was one very young couple in their early twenties who kept to themselves at first. The gossip going around the campground was that maybe they weren’t married, but living together. Everybody seemed to find this idea pleasantly shocking, and maybe some people were disappointed when the young couple finally took part in the social life of the campground. It turned out they were married (or so they said, although if they weren’t, I wouldn’t have blamed them for lying in that atmosphere of salacious gossip).
This would have been in 1983, probably. I don’t remember any other shocking examples of living-together-ness from my childhood. Possibly the 1980’s were when the stigma about it was starting to dissipate. I remember when I was a young teenager, in the early 90’s, my mother declaring that she wouldn’t attend any of her children’s weddings unless the couple had lived together for at least a year before getting married (she was assuming at the time that we were all straight). She attributed her (at the time, quite recent) divorce in part to rushing into marriage without getting to know her husband first.
She said this all very dramatically, and my sister and I took delight in passing on her words of wisdom to our friends in the church youth group. Our aim was to shock, and we succeeded. But even then, I was aware that this declaration would be more shocking to socially conservative religious people than to the average person. I don’t recall our gossipy campground in 1983 being especially religious. Maybe something happened between 1983 and 1993 that took the wind out of people’s sails when it came to judging premarital cohabitation.
Those of you who were adults during the relevant time period, would you say the 1980’s were when the stigma was lessened? Or was it earlier, in the 1970’s? It’s entirely possible my judgmental campground was an outlier and in 1983 it was already more or less acceptable to live together without being married.
This would have been in 1983, probably. I don’t remember any other shocking examples of living-together-ness from my childhood. Possibly the 1980’s were when the stigma about it was starting to dissipate. I remember when I was a young teenager, in the early 90’s, my mother declaring that she wouldn’t attend any of her children’s weddings unless the couple had lived together for at least a year before getting married (she was assuming at the time that we were all straight). She attributed her (at the time, quite recent) divorce in part to rushing into marriage without getting to know her husband first.
She said this all very dramatically, and my sister and I took delight in passing on her words of wisdom to our friends in the church youth group. Our aim was to shock, and we succeeded. But even then, I was aware that this declaration would be more shocking to socially conservative religious people than to the average person. I don’t recall our gossipy campground in 1983 being especially religious. Maybe something happened between 1983 and 1993 that took the wind out of people’s sails when it came to judging premarital cohabitation.
Those of you who were adults during the relevant time period, would you say the 1980’s were when the stigma was lessened? Or was it earlier, in the 1970’s? It’s entirely possible my judgmental campground was an outlier and in 1983 it was already more or less acceptable to live together without being married.
