Couples of all kinds are cohabiting
Children are included more, and education plays a role
Americans who cohabit are no longer just young couples testing the waters before heading to the altar, an analysis of new Census data reveals.
In fact, cohabitation is much more diverse: Nearly 30% are divorced, nearly half are 35 and older, and growing numbers are parents with children at home, according to the analysis by the non-profit Population Reference Bureau for USA TODAY.
As of March, when Census did a count of cohabiters, 15.3 million unmarried heterosexual people were in live-in relationships — 6.5% of all adults 18 and over. The survey did not include those who had cohabited in the past but are now married or are living alone or with family or friends.
Cohabiters are “increasingly more diverse than a decade ago,” says sociologist Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “The idea that young adults are domi- nant is really wrong. There is no stereotypical cohabiting couple anymore. The middle class, childless, cohabiting couple represents a very small proportion of all cohabiting Americans.”
The data will be part of a Census report on families and living arrangements scheduled for release in November. Among the highlights:
u41% of cohabiting couples have children living with them.
u47% are 35 and older, and 13% are 55 and over.
u21% have a bachelor’s degree or higher, 31% have some college, 35% have a high school diploma, and 13% did not graduate from high school.
“People are living together for different reasons. It depends where you are in your life,” says demogra- pher Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau.
For the young, cohabitation is a “prelude to marriage,” while for older adults, it’s a “long-term alternative to marriage,” says sociologist Susan Brown, co-director of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
“There has been this doubling of the proportion of older adults who are living in cohabiting relationships,” she says. “It’s grown for late middle-age and the oldest adults — a clear upward trend for both of these groups, and no signs this is going to slow down.”
Deanna Medina and Ever Gutierrez of Los Angeles have been engaged for three years and have lived together for 12.
They also have three kids together, ages 17 months to 11 years.
Though more of the USA’s cohabiters are childless (59% — almost 9 million — as of March, when the Census counted current cohabiters), they’re not the only ones driving the rise in cohabitation. There are also 6.3 million who, like Medina and Gutierrez, have kids and make up the other 41%. About half of those have kids from a previous relationship, and half are kids from the cohabiting relationship, researchers say.
“One kind of cohabitation that people have overlooked is the growing number of cohabiting young adults with children,” says Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “Demographers think almost all the increase in non-marital childbearing has been to cohabiting couples.”
About 63% of cohabiters have never been married, but 29% are divorced and 5% separated, according to an exclusive analysis of new Census data for USA TODAY. It also found that education is a factor.
“We’ve seen this sharp increase in cohabitation in recent years, but it’s really been those with less education that have been driving that trend,” says demographer Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau, which did the analysis. “Almost half of these cohabiters have a high school degree or less.”
Research presented Wednesday at a meeting at the National Center for Health Statistics shows similar findings. Among 5,180 women ages 18-36, most had cohabited, one study finds. But those with a college degree were “less likely to cohabit overall and more likely to get married if they do cohabit,” says lead author Sharon Sassler, a social demographer at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
Of those who cohabit, more than half are in the first six months of the start of the sexual relationship, the study found. But for college-educated women, about 30% take two or more years to move in with a partner.
Medina, who turns 32 next month, went to the University of Arizona for one year after she finished high school in 1998. But she moved back to L.A. to be closer to her widowed mother and Gutierrez, 34, whom she had dated since high school.
They moved in together in 2000. “I had marriage on the brain from the very beginning,” she says. “I wanted to see if this was going to last.”
After their first daughter was born in 2001, the couple split for three months. And when their second daughter was born, Medina says, she became hesitant about marriage.
“I had a lot of friends or family members who were getting divorced. It was, to me, a bad omen,” she says. But when kids at school told their daughters that because their parents weren’t married they were going to break up, “they came home in tears and said, ‘ We’re not a real family.’ ”
Gutierrez, who builds swimming pools, says marriage became more important to him after that. “I felt that we needed to get it done,” he says.
They have a deposit on a wedding location for September 2013, but Medina is pregnant again and says they’ll wait until after the birth of the baby in March to decide whether to have a big wedding or do something more lowkey. “I have been envisioning my big day all these years,” she says. But “we’re probably going to end up doing a small service for the sake of our kids and each other.”
About 60% of cohabiting moms will marry by the time a child is 12, says family demographer Christina Gibson-Davis of Duke University in Durham, N.C. Her research on births to cohabiting households from 2003 to 2010 also found that 52% marry a stepfather and 48% marry the child’s biological father.