Family Facts: Social Science Research on Family, Society & Religion
Top Ten Findings
Cohabitation vs. Marriage: How Love’s Choices Shape Life Outcomes
February 2007
1. Cohabiting couples without plans to marry tend to report poorer relationship quality than married couples. Compared to counterparts who were married, those in cohabiting unions reported having a poorer quality of relationship: They reported having more fights and violence, lower levels of fairness, and less happiness in their relationships. However, the quality of relationship of cohabitors who planned to marry did not differ from that of their married counterparts.
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2. Cohabiting couples are more likely to separate and less likely to reconcile after a separation than married couples. Cohabiting couples were nearly eight times more likely to separate due to discord than married couples in the first year of a relationship. Cohabiting couples were nearly four times more likely to separate in the second year and three times more likely to separate in the third year. Cohabiting couples had a separation rate five times that of married couples, and following separation, cohabiting couples had a rate of reconciliation that was one-third that of married couples.
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3. Cohabiting couples are more likely to experience infidelity than married couples. Among those surveyed, cohabiting couples were twice as likely as to have experienced an act of infidelity in the 12 months prior to the survey than married couples.
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4. Compared to women who did not cohabit before marriage, those who did are more likely to experience divorce or separation. Women who cohabited before marriage were 33 percent more likely to have a marriage that ended in divorce or separation than women who did not cohabit before marriage.
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5. Among individuals in their fifties, those who are cohabiting tend to have accumulated less wealth than their married peers. Among a sample of pre-retirement respondents, compared to those who were continuously married, cohabiting respondents who had never married had, on average, 78 percent less total wealth (“net worth”) and those who were cohabiting and had been divorced or widowed once had 68 percent less wealth. Cohabitors who had been divorced or widowed twice were not significantly different from the continuously married group in their net worth.
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6. Among mothers with infants, those in cohabiting relationships tend to fare worse economically than married mothers. When the babies were six months old, married mothers reported, on average, the highest income-to-needs ratio (4.26), followed by cohabiting mothers (2.3) and then single mothers (1.17). Income-to-needs ratio (total family income divided by poverty threshold) is an indicator of financial resources for per person in each household; higher ratios suggest greater financial resources.
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7. Men in cohabiting households tend to have lower earnings than married men with families. Based on the 1990 census, the average income of males in married-couple families ($34,533) was twice that of males in co-habiting couple families ($17,889).
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8. Compared to their married peers, women who are cohabiting tend to have higher earnings relative to their partners’ earnings. Women who were married and those who were cohabiting differed in their relative earnings to their partners’ earnings. On average, women who were cohabiting earned nearly 90 percent of her partner's salary, whereas a wife earned just over 60 percent of the husband's income. Women in cohabiting unions tended to spend more time in paid employment than married women and were also more likely than married women to earn more than the partner.
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9. Compared to married individuals, those are cohabiting tend to report higher levels of depression. Compared with married peers of the same gender, age and race, individuals who were cohabiting reported depression levels that were about 2.8 points higher that those reported by married individuals. Couple’s total earnings, duration of the relationship, relationship instability were a mediating factors correlated with depression.
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10. Individuals who are cohabiting report, on average, more alcohol problems than married individuals. Respondents who were cohabiting reported nearly three times more alcohol problems than married respondents and about 25 percent more than non-cohabiting single peers. Cohabiting men reported more alcohol problems than both married and single men, and cohabiting women reported more alcohol problems than married women.
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Events:Religious Practice and Civic Life: What the Research Says October 4, 2007 |