For decades, moving in together read as a dry run for the wedding — a soft launch before the save-the-dates went out. That assumption doesn’t hold up anymore. According to a Child Trends analysis of two long-running federal surveys, only 22% of women who began cohabiting with a partner between 2006 and 2013 had married that same partner within five years. In the mid-to-late 1980s, the figure was 42%. Couples aren’t splitting up more than they used to, either. They’re simply stopping in a place that used to be a hallway and living there.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
The Child Trends report, which draws on data from the National Survey of Family Growth and the National Survey of Families and Households, found that the drop from 42% to 22% happened gradually across three decades of cohorts, not in one sudden break. The National Survey of Family Growth has tracked American family formation on a running basis since 1973, and the National Survey of Families and Households began following comparable cohorts in the late 1980s, giving researchers a rare same-methodology comparison spanning close to three decades of cohabiting couples rather than a single snapshot. Fewer than half as many women who move in with a partner today go on to marry that person within five years compared with their counterparts in the Reagan era. That’s not a small shift in a niche behavior — cohabitation has become the majority experience. The Institute for Family Studies notes that in 1967, fewer than 1% of people living with a romantic partner were unmarried; by 2023, that share had climbed past 13%, and more adults aged 18 to 44 have now cohabited at some point than have ever married.
Breakups Aren’t Driving the Change
The obvious explanation — that cohabiting relationships are simply falling apart faster — doesn’t hold up against the data. Per Child Trends, 35% of cohabitations formed between 1983 and 1988 ended in separation within five years. Among couples who started cohabiting between 2006 and 2013, that number was 36%, essentially unchanged. What did change is what happens to the relationships that survive. Instead of resolving into a marriage or a breakup within a few years, more of them simply continue as-is — average cohabitation length grew from roughly a year in the mid-1980s to about a year and a half for more recent cohorts, and a growing share stretch on far longer than that without a wedding ever entering the picture.
That distinction matters for anyone currently living with a partner and wondering whether the relationship is “supposed” to be moving toward something else. It may not be stalling. It may just be following a timeline that no longer resembles their parents’.
Why Cohabitation Stopped Being a Waiting Room
Part of the shift is generational patience, and part of it is arithmetic. The Institute for Family Studies found that among adults born in the 1950s who cohabited, 23% converted that relationship into a marriage within a single year. Among those born in the 1980s, only 12% did. Marriage increasingly gets treated as a capstone — something couples build toward once finances, careers, and living arrangements feel settled — rather than a formal starting gate for adult life. Rising housing costs and delayed financial independence stretch out the runway further, and cohabitation absorbs that waiting period in a way that a generation ago it wasn’t built to do.
What Longer Cohabitation Actually Looks Like
None of this means cohabitation functions identically to marriage once a couple settles into it long-term. The Institute for Family Studies found that just 6% of cohabiting relationships among adults born in the 1980s were still intact as cohabitations — neither converted to marriage nor ended — a full decade in, roughly double the 3% share of the prior generation who were still in that same holding pattern at the ten-year mark. First marriages remain far more durable by comparison, with about three-quarters still intact after a decade. Cohabitation also increasingly comes with children attached rather than preceding them — the same research found over a third of cohabiting couples now have kids together, with another 19% raising children from earlier relationships under the same roof, meaning “just living together” often carries the same logistics and financial entanglement as marriage without the legal scaffolding.
What’s changed isn’t whether people want committed partnerships — cohabitation rates and relationship satisfaction studies suggest they still do. What’s changed is the assumption that commitment has to graduate into a marriage license on any particular timetable, or at all. For a lot of couples now, the moving truck wasn’t a rehearsal. It was the show.
