At the current stage of social development, the live-in relationships are common, especially among the young couples. Still, such way of life is a subject of the controversy in both Eastern and Western societies. It has been traditionally established that the institutions of family and marriage are two prior values in the human life. Nevertheless, more and more couples treat marriage as nothing else but a legal formality.
Compared to the legal marriage, live-in may be treated as an uncommitted type of relationships where partners have little responsibilities or faith to one another. Therefore, conservative society definitely perceives live-in as the peak of chaos which will soon destroy lives of youth. However, liberal minds do not take undocumented relationships as a crime at all. To their point of view, marriage requires but does not really guarantee spouses being faithful, committed, caring to their children. Married couples do not experience less family violence than those who live-in, and a lot of married Americans get a divorce ruining their families.
From the legal point of view, marriage provides much more benefits than just living together. Getting a divorce, single parents demand maintenance money from their former partners. Maintenance usually helps single parents a lot as even after divorce the two people provide financial backing for the children raised by a single parent.
It is a very common practice that couples first live-in for a while, and they get married when planning to have a baby. This type of relations is convenient to the partners as there is no use of getting married before they know for sure that their bond is nothing but a solid love, commitment, and support. Consequently, we shall treat live-in and marriage as two important stages of building a strong family.