The Changing Institution of Marriage: Adolescents’ Expectations to Cohabit and Marry

Cohabitation has become a typical part of most young adults’ pathway toward marriage. Yet, most prior work focuses on expectations to marry and has ignored cohabitation. We examine factors associated with teenagers’ expectations to cohabit and their expectations to marry. Since most young adults are not replacing marriage with cohabitation, but instead cohabit and then marry, it is important to study teenagers’ joint expectations to cohabit as well as marry. Our analyses draw on recently collected data from the Toledo Relationships Study (n=1,293). We find that adolescents are less certain about their cohabitation than marriage expectations. Interactions with the opposite sex, traditional values, risk and resilience factors, and parents influence adolescent’s union formation expectations. The findings from this work suggest that adolescents are including cohabitation as part of their future life trajectory, but they are rarely substituting cohabitation for marriage.