‘Explosion’ of Cohabitation Before Marriage Reported

Nearly half of all married Americans lived with a person of the opposite sex when they were still single, according to a national survey conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.

UW sociologists Larry Bumpass and James Sweet interviewed 13,000 randomly selected people nationwide last fall. The conclusions are considered preliminary and based on the 7,491 cases processed to date.

The survey is the first ever to concentrate specifically on information about families.

Bumpass and Sweet said the increase in the last two decades in the number of people who live together without being married “amounts to an explosion.”

Eleven percent of Americans married between 1965 and 1974 lived with someone of the opposite sex before their first marriage, the researchers said. For those married between 1980 and 1984, the figure jumped to 44%.

Soon Be ‘Majority Experience’

They also found that living together is even more frequent between marriages: 58% of recently remarried people said they had cohabited.

“Cohabitation has not simply become increasingly common,” the researchers said. “If recent trends continue, it will soon be the majority experience.”

Bumpass and Sweet also found that married people who had cohabited, either with each other or with someone else, were much more likely to divorce than people who never had cohabited.

Using information on first marriages since 1975, the researchers found that 10 years after marriage, 53% of those who had cohabited before marriage had divorced, compared with 28% of those who had never cohabited and had divorced.

But they stopped short of saying cohabitation causes divorce.

‘Less Traditional Attitudes’

“We think that people who cohabit have less traditional attitudes in general about marriage,” Bumpass said. “The same attitudes that make a person decide to live with someone also may make the person more likely to find divorce an acceptable way to end an unsatisfactory marriage.”

“We know that the family has changed, that people delay getting married and delay having children. We know there has been an increase in divorce and a decline in remarriage,” the researchers said.