Living Together: A Guide to Counseling Unmarried Couples Book

Clear, Biblical, compassionate, and very practical. There are not many (any?) other books from a Christian perspective on counseling cohabiting couples, so it's fortunate this one is so solid. Highly recommended to pastors and anyone interested in developing and articulating a Biblical theology of marriage in today's changing cultural context.

VanGoethem first works to lay out the current realities of cohabitation, paying careful attention to the development and dismantling of the conventional wisdom that cohabitation should lead to lowered divorce rates and increased happiness in marriage. Reality has intruded on those dreams, leaving behind a doubled incidence of divorce, and a greatly decreased level of happiness in marriage, both of which become more severe, not less, the longer a couple cohabits. VanGoethem then discusses the current state of research on cohabitation, and closes the first section with attention to the Biblical perspective on cohabitation.

His second section enunciates a Biblical theology of covenant and marriage, and he closes the book with practical advice on how to counsel couples who are cohabiting.

Brisk but comprehensive, compassionate but clear, this book deserves to be on every Evangelical pastor's shelf, dog-eared and underlined.