Why do more couples live together but fewer marry? "I don’t think he ever wants to get married, to be truthful." “You get caught in limbo. You’ve already got all of these amenities and benefits of marriage and you sort of forget about moving forward. It’s pretty easy to get stuck.” “I don’t know. I guess there’s a little voice inside me saying that maybe I shouldn’t.” —Responses from interviews ANN ARBOR—About one in four cohabiting women say they don’t expect to marry the man they’re living with, according to a new study published in the current (November 2002) issue of the “Journal of Family Issues.” “For many couples, cohabitation is not a steppingstone to marriage, the modern equivalent of a formal engagement, or part of some natural progression of commitment in a relationship,” said University of Michigan sociologist Pamela J. Smock, co-author of an article titled “First Comes Cohabitation and Then Comes Marriage?” with Bowling Green State University researcher Wendy Manning. More unmarried couples than ever before are living together, noted Smock, associate director of the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR), the world’s largest academic survey and research organization. The latest U.S. Census Bureau survey establishes the number of such households at 4.7 million in 2000. But according to Manning and Smock, fewer of today’s cohabiting unions are resulting in marriage. In the 1990s, they point out, only about one-third of cohabiting couples married within three years, compared to about 60 percent in the 1970s. “For many couples, living together has become a viable alternative to either marriage or living alone,” Smock said. The current study, showing that a sizeable proportion of minority women do not expect to marry the man they’re living with, is based on an analysis of the latest available data from the National Study of Family Growth, a federally funded survey of a nationally representative sample of more than 10,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. At the time that they were surveyed, 772 of the women reported that they were cohabiting. Their average age was 26, with 35 percent reporting that they had been married before their current union began. The average age of their partners was 29. “Do you expect to marry your current boyfriend?” the women were asked. Smock and Manning analyzed their responses to see how a variety of factors, including race, ethnicity and education, as well as their partner’s income and education, were related to the women’s marriage expectations. They found that older women were less likely to say they expected to marry than younger women, and that women who had been married or cohabited before were less likely than others to expect that their current union would lead to marriage. They also found that Black women were less likely than white women to say they expected to marry their live-in partners. Women whose partners had a high level of education and income were more likely to expect to marry than women living with less affluent and educated men, the researchers found. With funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Development, Manning and Smock are now conducting in-depth personal interviews with couples, to "unpack" what cohabitation means for today’s younger cohabiting couples. “We know from past survey research that when both partners are asked about their plans to marry, about 25 percent give different answers,” Smock said. “We also know that women are more likely than men to say that they expect to marry the person they’re living with,” Smock said. “But as we began to talk with young adults in some depth about their cohabiting relationships, we realized that for many of them, cohabitation was not even a conscious decision, let alone part of a plan leading to marriage. Very often, both men and women seemed to regard moving in together as simply a situational response to economic and other stress.” With the recent emergence of federal and state policies designed to encourage marriage, particularly among low-income couples with children, Manning and Smock believe it’s more important than ever to understand why cohabiting unions begin and end, and how young adults who live together perceive and experience their roles as partners and parents. “Our current results suggest that male disadvantage deters marriage plans," Smock and Manning noted in their article, "and to the extent that Black males are disproportionately disadvantaged, cohabitation may lead to marriage less often among Blacks than among ethnic groups with more advantaged males.” That finding, according to Smock, suggests that unless the government finds ways to improve the status of less educated and advantaged men, policies to increase the marriage rate among low-income and minority people will probably not be successful.

Related links: ISR: www.isr.umich.edu Pamela Smock: www.psc.isr.umich.edu/people/pjsmock.html First Comes Cohabitation and Then Comes Marriage? http://www.bgsu.edu/organizations/cfdr/research/pdf/2000/2000-02.pdf (Requires Acrobat or other .PDF reader.)

Established in 1948, the Institute for Social Research (ISR) is among the world’s oldest survey research organizations, and a world leader in the development and application of social science methodology. ISR conducts some of the most widely-cited studies in the nation, including the Survey of Consumer Attitudes, the National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, the Columbia County Longitudinal Study and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the Institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China, and South Africa. Visit the ISR Web site at www.isr.umich.edu for more information. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest computerized social science data archive.