, a Ph.D. in Human Resource Development who has just written a book called “Happily Un-Married: Living Together and Loving It!,” has written this piece for BoomerCafé about the change in habit for so many of us. His bottom line is, what goes around, comes around.

The way couples define commitment is dynamic. In our parents’ time, pre-1960s, few couples lived together without virtue of marriage. If they did, no one ever talked about it. Now, due in part to all the boomers who shacked up in the ‘60s, got married in the ‘70s, divorced in the ‘80s, and raised the first generation of children to come largely from broken homes, cohabitation is back with a vengeance.

Since so many of the children of baby boomers fear a failed marriage after seeing it in their own lives, nearly ten million couples are cohabitating instead, living together in an attempt to learn from their parents’ mistakes. And the fact is, many of these parents who made those mistakes have gone back to cohabitation themselves. Living together is not just for the twenty-something crowd.

Try before you commit, is a logical yet frequently discredited approach to building a successful relationship in the shadow of decades of failed marriages. While the U.S. leads the world in divorce, when it comes to cohabitation, we are playing catch-up with our European cousins who have some of the highest cohabitation rates in the world. This time around, we have the opportunity to get it right, to make cohabitation a successful institution rather than a failed social experiment as it was in the ‘60s.

But our motives have changed. We no longer cohabitate to rebel, to indulge in free love, or to reject our parents’ values. Instead, our motive is fear-based: we don’t want to make the same mistakes our parents did, and have another failed marriage ourselves. This time around, we need to take a totally different approach to improving the fitness and sustainability of our live-in relationships. We need a clear, step-by-step method that is not touchy-feely, judgmental, or complicated, and is based on the reality of what it means to be in a committed relationship in the 21st century.

“Happily Unmarried: Living Together & Loving It,” shows how to use business strategies to support any live-in relationship, so couples can be successful, committed, and happily un-married. Just think of it as a join venture.

1. Develop a common vision for the relationship to define why the relationship exists— before the shock that can happen after moving in together;

2. Write measurable objectives— determine how you will know if the relationship is progressing “according to plan,” and how to productively re-evaluate the relationship on a regular basis to either end it constructively, or to deepen it;

3. Develop and market a relationship “brand”— a “love logo” to head off the judgments and criticisms of friends and family before they start;

4. Merge “mindstyles”— to eliminate common battles like… how to spend the holidays, what to do with household possessions … how to cope with children from other relationships;

5. Create clear job descriptions— pinpoint each partner’s chores to prevent battles over simple things like who takes out the trash!