Friday, March 22, 2002
Cohabitation going mainstream in America
A story published today by the St. Paul Star Tribune reports that over the past 30 years American couples have quietly moved cohabiting from the fringes to the mainstream. These days, more than half of couples taking their wedding vows already have lived together.
It's a statistic that shows this country is not quite going the way of Sweden: We don't cohabit instead of marriage; we cohabit on the way to marriage.
"We've gone beyond the 50 percent mark," said Pamela Smock, a sociologist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. "We're closer to 60 percent for first marriages. Soon we're not going to be asking questions about who does decide to cohabit, but who doesn't."
One indication of the jump in cohabiting couples is the U.S. Census, which shows an increase in unmarried men and women sharing a household, from 500,000 in 1970 to 4.9 million in 2000. Another revealing Census statistic: 90 percent of Americans will marry at least once.
A growing body of research is bringing more detailed understanding of cohabitation:
Of cohabiting couples, about 50 percent marry within five years, 40 percent break up, and 10 percent simply continue living together.
Forty percent of all children spend some time in a cohabiting household.
Some research found that domestic violence is twice as common among cohabiting couples as married couples, and that depression rates are higher. Also, cohabiting couples who then marry are 50 percent more likely to divorce.
But other research found that the relationships of cohabiting couples who plan to marry each other — up to 75 percent of all cohabitors — are as good as those of married couples.
"All those differences are why we need to be careful not to treat cohabitors as a monolithic group," said Susan Brown, sociologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. "A couple plans to marry? Presence of children? Ever married? Depending on all that, cohabiting is going to have very different outcomes."
