Seventy-seven percent of U.S. adults in their late 30s and early 40s have lived with a romantic partner they weren’t married to, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis published this month. That number alone rewrites a lot of assumptions about how American couples actually move toward marriage, or don’t. Cohabitation isn’t a fringe alternative to marriage anymore. For the large majority of people now approaching midlife, it’s simply the step most people take first, and Pew’s data shows the path from there splits sharply depending on who you are.
The number is bigger than most people expect
Pew’s researchers used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, tracking a cohort of Americans now in their late 30s and early 40s, to measure how many had ever cohabited with a romantic partner outside of marriage. The 77% figure covers cohabitation of any length, not just brief arrangements, and it includes people who went on to marry that partner as well as those who didn’t. It’s a marked shift from prior generations, where living together before marriage carried more social stigma and was measurably less common.
What makes the data useful isn’t just the topline number, though — it’s how sharply the outcomes diverge once you start splitting by education and race.
Education changes almost everything about the outcome
Among adults with a bachelor’s degree, cohabitation functions largely as a step toward marriage: most college-educated adults who moved in with a partner eventually married that same person. Among adults without a four-year degree, the picture looks different. Cohabiting relationships in this group are less likely to convert into marriage and more likely to end in a breakup or continue indefinitely as a long-term unmarried partnership.
That divide tracks with a broader pattern researchers have documented for years: marriage rates have fallen more sharply among Americans without a college degree, even as the overall marriage rate has declined across the board. Pew’s new data adds another layer to that story — it’s not just that non-college-educated adults marry less, it’s that when they do move in with a partner, that decision is less reliably a precursor to marriage than it is for college-educated peers.
Race adds another layer to the pattern
Pew’s breakdown by race shows similarly uneven outcomes. Black and Hispanic adults in the surveyed cohort were more likely than white adults to have cohabited at some point, but less likely to have that cohabitation lead directly to marriage. White and Asian adults in the sample showed higher rates of cohabitation converting into marriage over the survey period.
None of this means cohabitation itself is becoming less common across any group — quite the opposite, it’s now the majority experience nearly everywhere in the data. What’s diverging is what cohabitation actually predicts about a couple’s future, and that prediction now depends heavily on education level and racial background in ways that weren’t as pronounced a generation ago.
Why this matters beyond the statistics
The practical implication is that “living together” has stopped being a single, uniform relationship stage with one likely outcome. For one group of Americans, cohabitation functions close to how engagement used to: a strong signal that marriage is coming. For another group, it’s closer to its own distinct relationship category, one that can last for years without ever converting into a legal marriage, or that ends without one.
That split has real consequences beyond the symbolic. Marriage still carries legal and financial protections that cohabitation doesn’t automatically provide, from inheritance rights to how assets get divided if a relationship ends. A cohabiting relationship that both partners assume will eventually become a marriage, and one where marriage was never really on the table, look identical from the outside, but carry very different levels of legal protection for both people if things end unexpectedly.
What Pew’s data ultimately captures is a country where the on-ramp to marriage has become nearly universal, but where the destination that on-ramp actually leads to now depends heavily on factors that have little to do with how much two people love each other.
