Item from the Smart Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics Collection

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U.S. News & World Report - March, 2000

No Wedding? No Ring? No Problem!
(More and more Americans opt for cohabitation)
By Jay Tolson

Before 1970, it was called "living in sin" or "shacking up," and it was
illegal in every state of the union. Why then, many social scientists are
beginning to ask, has America's 30-year rise in unmarried cohabitation
remained a shadow issue in the family-values debate? "Unlike divorce or
unwed
childbearing, the trend toward cohabitation has inspired virtually no
public
comment or criticism," note David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead,
co-directors of Rutgers University's National Marriage Project.
University of
Michigan sociologist Pamela J. Smock, whose survey of recent research
will
appear in the Annual Review of Sociology to be published this summer,
finds
that most Americans are still unaware of the extent or significance of
cohabitation, even though more than half of today's newlyweds live
together
before tying the knot, compared with about 10 percent in 1965.

Scholars are quick to point out that the United States is still a long
way
from Sweden, where unmarried couplesí - who have all the rights,
benefits, and
obligations of married partnersí - make up about 30 percent of couples
sharing
households. In America, by contrast, cohabiting couples make up only
about 7
percent of the total. And for most of those 4 million couples, living
together is a transitory business: 55 percent marry and 40 percent end
the
relationship within five years. "In this country," says University of
Chicago
sociologist Linda J. Waite, coauthor of the forthcoming Case for
Marriage,
"it's still mostly up or out."

What Smock has found is that the proportion for whom it's "out" of the
union
is on the rise. In addition, more and more unmarried women who become
pregnant choose to cohabit rather than marry, which means that living
together is increasingly a substitute for marriage, particularly, notes
Smock, among African-Americans.

One of the biggest revelations of the new research is how many cohabiting
arrangements involve children. "About one half of previously married
cohabitors and 35 percent of never-married cohabitors have children in
the
household," Smock reports. She adds that almost 40 percent of all
supposedly
single-parent families are really two-parent cohabiting families.
Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that kids in these households fare as
well
as kids with two married parents. "The nonparent partner . . . has no
explicit legal, financial, supervisory, or custodial rights or
responsibilities regarding the child of his partner," notes Linda Waite
in
the winter issue of The Responsive Community. Studies cited by Popenoe
and
Whitehead suggest there is also a greater risk of physical or sexual
abuse in
those situations.

Few romantic notions about cohabitational bliss withstand close scrutiny.
While there is a little more sex between unmarried cohabitors than
between
married couples (one more act per month), there's also more cheating by
both
partners. Then, too, there's more domestic violence and a higher
incidence of
depression.

But since living together is still mainly a stage in courtship for the
majority of marriagebound Americans, the critical question is how the
experience affects the subsequent union. Here the evidence is slightly
mixed.
According to most research, couples who live togetheríÏwith the possible
exception of those who move in already planning to wedíÏtend to have
rockier
marriages and a greater risk of divorce. Why this is so is hard to say.
It
could be that people who cohabit are less traditional in their ideas and
less
reluctant to divorce. But it's also possible that the experience itself
has
an effect. "We need to do more qualitative research," says Smock, "and
talk
to people in their 20s . . . to find out why they are doing what they are
doing."

Old rules. Some of the scholars who are studying the phenomenoní -
including
Popenoe and Whiteheadí - are also taking sides, urging young adults to
reject
the argument that cohabitation is good preparation for marriage. Other
researchers are taking aim at the economic disincentives to marriage,
including the marriage penalty in the tax code and restrictions on
Medicaid,
both of which often discourage less affluent cohabitors from tying the
knot.
There is even a movement to bring back an older form of courtship. Leon
and
Amy Kass co-teach a course at the University of Chicago described by the
former as "a higher kind of sex education." Using their own recently
published anthology, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and
Marrying, they attempt "to train the hearts and minds by means of noble
examples for romance leading to loving marriage."

Can such a quaint notion win over minds hardened by the "divorce
revolution"
of their parents' generation? Steven L. Nock, a University of Virginia
researcher, is guardedly optimistic that durable marriages will make a
comeback (and in fact, since 1990, have been doing so), whether or not
old
courtship styles are restored. "My generation," says the 49-year-old
sociologist, "was the first to confront equality of the sexes. As a
result,
many reacted to the changed rules by fleeing from marriage. I suspect
that
our children, who've grown up with gender equality as a given, will be
less
likely to flee marriage." That might not be the "horse and carriage"
argument, but it makes some sense.

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