"just living together"

It is sad that so many hearts are broken in reinventing a wheel that so many cultures already got pretty right thousands of years ago. Even the NY Times is letting writers admit in public what the statistics people already know: living together is a really bad way to start a marriage you want to last. Sr Helena always includes this tidbit in her presentations on Theology of the Body, because for young people today it is so counterintuitive. Among other things, though, it says a lot about the way men and women enter into apartment-sharing: for the woman, it is a kind of incremental approach to marriage, and the very agreement to live together is an implicit commitment. But according to books like Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man (not recommended in all respects, but a helpful resource nonetheless), commitment on a man's part is never something implicit. That is probably why couples who are already engaged to each other when they start living together have a better chance of a lasting marriage than those who just drift into a shared living arrangement.
Living together without the very real benefit of marriage is only one issue in the panorama of human relationships that await the Gospel of the Theology of the Body.