In an era when half of marriages end in divorce, cohabitation has become more commonplace and those who do get married are doing so at an older age. So why do people marry when they do? And why do some couples choose to cohabit? A team of expert family sociologists examines these timely questions in Marriage and Cohabitation, the result of their research over the last decade on the issue of union formation. Situating their argument in the context of the Western world’s 500-year history of marriage, the authors reveal what factors encourage marriage and cohabitation in a contemporary society where the end of adolescence is no longer signaled by entry into the marital home. While some people still choose to marry young, others elect to cohabit with varying degrees of commitment or intentions of eventual marriage. The authors’ controversial findings suggest that family history, religious affiliation, values, projected education, lifetime earnings, and career aspirations all tip the scales in favor of either cohabitation or marriage. This book lends new insight into young adult relationship patterns and will be of interest to sociologists, historians, and demographers alike.

This open access book presents an innovative study of the rise of unmarried cohabitation in the Americas, from Canada to Argentina. Using an extensive sample of individual census data for nearly all countries on the continent, it offers a cross-national, comparative view of this recent demographic trend and its impact on the family. The book offers a tour of the historical legacies and regional heterogeneity in unmarried cohabitation, covering: Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central America, Colombia, the Andean region, Brazil, and the Southern Cone. It also explores the diverse meanings of cohabitation from a cross-national perspective and examines the theoretical implications of recent developments on family change in the Americas. The book uses data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, International (IPUMS), a project dedicated to collecting and distributing census data from around the world. This large sample size enables an empirical testing of one of the currently most powerful explanatory frameworks for changes in family formation around the world, the theory of the Second Demographic Transition. With its unique geographical scope, this book will provide researchers with a new understanding into the spectacular rise in premarital cohabitation in the Americas, which has become one of the most salient trends in partnership formation in the region.

Cohabitation has become increasingly popular, replacing marriage for most young people as the first type of relationship they will enter into. Politicians and pundits often treat cohabitation and marriage as essentially the same, with marriage dismissed as no more than a 'piece of paper'.

Why not cohabitate? Many believe nothing is better for their future marriage than a trial period—cohabitation. It’s the fastest growing family type in the U.S. So how’s that working out? Are people truly happier? Author Glenn Stanton offers a compelling factual case that nearly every area of health and happiness is increased by marriage and decreased by cohabitation. With credible data and compassion, Stanton explores the reasons why the cohabitation trend is growing; outlines its negative outcomes for men, women, and children; and makes a case for why marriage is still the best arrangement for the flourishing of couples and society. This resource is ideal for those who are cohabitating or considering it, as well as pastors and counselors who need to be able to engage this issue.

“We have fun and we enjoy each other’s company, so why shouldn’t we just move in together?”—Lauren, from Cohabitation Nation Living together is a typical romantic rite of passage in the United States today. In fact, census data shows a 37 percent increase in couples who choose to commit to and live with one another, forgoing marriage. And yet we know very little about this new “normal” in romantic life. When do people decide to move in together, why do they do so, and what happens to them over time? Drawing on in-depth interviews, Sharon Sassler and Amanda Jayne Miller provide an inside view of how cohabiting relationships play out before and after couples move in together, using couples’ stories to explore the he said/she said of romantic dynamics. Delving into hot-button issues, such as housework, birth control, finances, and expectations for the future, Sassler and Miller deliver surprising insights about the impact of class and education on how relationships unfold. Showcasing the words, thoughts, and conflicts of the couples themselves, Cohabitation Nation offers a riveting and sometimes counterintuitive look at the way we live now.

Using longitudinal data from the Swiss Household Panel to zoom in on continuity and change in the life course, this open access book describes how the lives of the Swiss population have changed in terms of health, family circumstances, work, political participation, and migration over the last sixteen years. What are the different trajectories in terms of mobility, health, wealth, and family constellations? What are the drivers behind all these changes over time and in the life course? And what are the implications for inequality in society and for social policy? The Swiss Household Panel is a unique ongoing longitudinal survey that has followed a large sample of Swiss households since 1999. The data provide the rare opportunity to go beyond a snapshot of contemporary Swiss society and give insight into the processes in people’s lives and in society that lie behind recent developments.

Growing up in a divorced family leads to a variety of difficulties for adult offspring in their own partnerships. One of the best known and most powerful is the divorce cycle, the transmission of divorce from one generation to the next. This book examines how the divorce cycle has transformed family life in contemporary America by drawing on two national data sets. Compared to people from intact families, the children of divorce are more likely to marry as teenagers, but less likely to wed overall, more likely to marry people from divorced families, more likely to dissolve second and third marriages, and less likely to marry their live-in partners. Yet some of the adverse consequences of parental divorce have abated even as divorce itself proliferated and became more socially accepted. Taken together, these findings show how parental divorce is a strong force in people's lives and society as a whole.

What is a family? What makes someone a parent? What rights should children have? In this Very Short Introduction Jonathan Herring provides an insight not only into what the law is, but why it is the way it is. It also looks at the future to consider what families will look like in the years ahead, and what new dilemmas the courts may face.

In this tender, funny, and sharp companion to her acclaimed memoir-in-essays Amateur Hour, Kimberly Harrington explores and confronts marriage, divorce, and the ways love, loss, and longing shape a life. Six weeks after Kimberly and her husband announced their divorce, she began work on a book that she thought would only be about divorce — heavy on the dark humor with a light coating of anger and annoyance. After all, on the heels of planning to dissolve a twenty-year marriage they had chosen to still live together in the same house with their kids. Throw in a global pandemic and her idea of what the end of a marriage should look and feel like was flipped even further on its head. This originally dark and caustic exploration turned into a more empathetic exercise, as she worked to understand what this relationship meant and why marriage matters so much. Over the course of two years of what was supposed to be a temporary period of transition, she sifted through her past—how she formed her ideas about relationships, sex, marriage, and divorce. And she dug back into the history of her marriage — how she and her future ex-husband had met, what it felt like to be madly in love, how they had changed over time, the impact having children had on their relationship, and what they still owed one another. But You Seemed So Happy is a time capsule of sorts. It’s about getting older and repeatedly dying on the hill of being wiser, only to discover you were never all that dumb to begin with. It’s an honest, intimate biography of a marriage, from its heady, idealistic, and easy beginnings to it slowly coming apart and finally to its evolution into something completely unexpected. As she probes what it means when everyone assumes you’re happy as long as you’re still married, Harrington skewers engagement photos, Gen X singularity, small-town busybodies, and the casual way we make life-altering decisions when we’re young. Ultimately, this moving and funny memoir in essays is a vulnerable and irreverent act of forgiveness—of ourselves, our partners, and the relationships that have run their course but will always hold profound and permanent meaning in our lives.

The law has long been interested in marriage and conjugal cohabitation and in the range of public and private obligations that accrue from intimate living. This collection of classic articles explores that legal interest, while at the same time locating marriage and cohabitation within a range of intimate affiliations. It offers the perspectives of a number of international scholars on questions of how, if at all, our different ways of intimacy ought to be recognised and regulated by law.