'Living in sin'

Marriage is becoming the endangered institution according to latest research; marriage will be down by a half in the next generation. People who Never marry will outnumber (for the first time) married couples. But it’s not as if parts of the population en masse are taking religious vows and that the Jesuits are having a revival (as if…) but rather that many more are cohabiting. It’s estimated that there will be a sixty five per cent swell in cohabiting couples.

Cohabiting will increase that much, really? But if marriages are set to radically decline, than the prognosis is that the majority will never say ‘I do’, instead they might ‘shack up’ and ‘live in sin’ interminably. Oh no, I've used really anti-social lingo, and to say this term in public risks volcanic emotional reactions from 'shaker-uppers' or cohabitees. Some may even start crying, and scream, ‘why did you say ‘living in sin’!?’  It’s amazing that anyone is ‘free’ to live with whomever they want, and have the ‘choice’, but ‘we’ are not free to offer an opinion, nor do we have the ‘choice’ as to say 'living in sin'. But the ‘you’re so old-fashioned and judgmental for saying living in sin’ reaction is outrageously defensive. This guilty reaction was dramatised in the televised version of Brideshead Revisited. 

PS-I remember that a former colleague of mine was afraid to talk to me or even say hello because she knew I was a practising Catholic (the statue of Our Lady of Fatima on my desk may have given it away) and was afraid that I might breath something approaching the dreaded words..'living in sin'. The fear of the words was that terrifying...