Young Adulthood Relationships in an Era of Uncertainty: A Case for Cohabitation

Abstract

The young adulthood years are demographically dense. Dr. Ronald Rindfuss made this claim when he was Population Association of America (PAA) president in 1991 (Rindfuss 1991), and this conclusion holds today. I offer both an update of his work by including Millennials and a new view on young adulthood by focusing on an increasingly common experience: cohabitation. I believe we need to move away from our marriage-centric lens of young adulthood and embrace the complexity that cohabitation offers. The cohabitation boom is continuing with no evidence of a slowdown. Young adults are experiencing complex relationship biographies, and social science research is struggling to keep pace. Increasingly, there is a decoupling of cohabitation and marriage, suggesting new ways of framing our understanding of relationships in young adulthood. As a field, we can do better to ensure that our theories, methods, and data collections better reflect the new relationship reality faced by young adults.

Keywords: Cohabitation; Cohorts; Family; Marriage; Measurement.

Fig. 1

Age-specific rates and percentages for Baby Boomers and Millennials in young adulthood. The solid line represents the Baby Boomer cohort in young adulthood, and the dashed line represents the Millennial cohort in young adulthood. Sources: Panel a: 1989, National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS); 2016, ACS one-year estimates fertility rates per 1,000 women. Panel b: 1989, U.S. Census Bureau; 2013, U.S. Census Bureau, CPS. Panel c: 1990, NCHS; 2016, ACS one-year estimate first marriage rates per 1,000 never-married women. Panel d: 1990, NCHS; 2016, ACS one-year estimate remarriage rates per 1,000 previously married women. Panel e: 1990, NCHS; 2011, Centers for Disease Control/NCHS National Vital Statistics System. Panel f: IPUMS-CPS, University of Minnesota. Panel g: 1989, March CPS; 2017, IPUMS-CPS, University of Minnesota. Panel h: 1990 Decennial Census 1990; 2016 ACS one-year estimates. Panel i: 1997 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS); 2016 BJS national prison statistics rates per 100,000 U.S. residents. Panel j: 1995 and 2017, IPUMS-CPS, University of Minnesota currently cohabiting rates per 1,000 not currently living with a spouse.

Fig. 2

Young adult relationship statuses at ages 18 and 29. Sources: NSFH 1987/1988 and NLSY-97.

Fig. 3

Percentage cohabiting among women aged 25–29 coresiding in a union. Sources: 1990 and 2000 decennial censuses, Lesthaeghe et al. (2016), and 2010 and 2016 ACS one-year estimates.

Fig. 4

Percentage of young adult women aged 29–31 who ever married and ever cohabited. Sources: 1988 NSFG and 2011–2015 NSFG.

Fig. 5

Percentage of young adult women aged 29–31 who ever cohabited, by education level. Sources: 1988 NSFG and 2011–2015 NSFG.

Fig. 6

Percentage of young adult women aged 29–31 who ever cohabited, by race/ethnicity. Sources: 1988 NSFG and 2011–2015 NSFG.

Fig. 7

Percentage of young adult women aged 29–31 who experienced union dissolution among women ever in a coresidential union. Sources: 1988 NSFG and 2011–2015 NSFG.