I’m thinking of leaving my long-term partner to play the field

* My friend has recently split up with his long-term girlfriend (he is in his early 30s, as am I), and is really enjoying his new, revived, single sex life.

It’s made me question my relationship — whether I’m happy or not. I’ve been in a relationship for eight years and we have lived together for five years now. Should I play the field before settling down for life? I don’t want to realise later that I’ve missed out.

>> After an eight-year investment your girlfriend might be forgiven for presuming that the two of you were already “settled down for life”, but cohabitation is no guarantee of commitment.

Qualitative studies show that the decision to live together is commonly considered to be a transition to marriage, but the “try before you buy” approach doesn’t seem to work very well for relationships.

Cohabitation serves many purposes and not all of them imply increased commitment. The decision to live together can be a matter of sexual convenience, it can be a way of saving on rent, or an alternative to marriage. With so many disparate incentives it is hardly surprising that, in the US, 49% of cohabiting couples have broken up within five years, and after ten years that figure has risen to 62%.

Having said that, there are gender differences when it comes to expected outcomes. Women seem to go into cohabitation hoping to emerge with a ring on their fingers, but a study by Pollard and Harris (2013) found that 41% of cohabiting men (aged 18-26) were not “completely committed” to their live-in girlfriends.

Findings from a 2006 study by Galena Rhoades suggests that men who cohabit with their spouse before engagement are less dedicated than men who cohabit only after engagement, or not at all, before marriage.

Despite this, cohabiting relationships often last a lot longer than they should because, according to ‘inertia theory’, constraints such as mortgages, cats, children, Ikea sofas etc make cohabiting relationships more complicated to terminate.

Leaving a long-term partner is always risky because you might never meet anyone as nice again, so it’s worth making a last-ditch effort to see if you can resolve any stand-out issues. If what you want is more exciting sex, try expressing your desires to your girlfriend and see if she is enthusiastic. If you simply want more sex, you are unlikely to achieve that goal by making yourself single.

Figures from a large 2010 study from the Centre for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, which examined the sexual lives of 5,865 people between ages 14 and 94, found that 61% of singles hadn’t had sex within the past year, compared with 18% of married people.

Looking specifically at those between the ages of 25 and 59, 25% of married people reported they were still having sex two to three times per week versus less than 5% of singles.

While I’m not advising you to stay in this relationship if you feel unhappy or trapped, I would counsel you that the grass always appears to greener from a distance. Most single people would much prefer to be in a solid eight-year relationship. Recent research by the University of Toronto indicates men and women would rather settle for an unhappy relationship than face being alone.

Your primary concern seems to be whether or not you will wake up one morning and regret not having played the field, but there is a more serious issue at stake here. You, theoretically, can go on making babies until you are held together by pins. Your girlfriend, on the other hand, has a limited window of opportunity within which to have children and if she, too, is in her early 30s, chances are her biological clock is ticking.

This time constraint is what determines the trajectory of female commitment and that’s why, as Alvy Singer says to Annie Hall in Woody Allen’s film: “A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies.”

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