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Abstract
The dramatic growth in the number of couples living together without marriage over the course of the last ten to fifteen years in Western Europe and the United States raises questions about the relationship between this phenomenon and processes of family formation and dissolution. The aim of this dissertation is to examine the impact of nonmarital cohabitation on the sequence and timing of some important life-course events, including marriage and marital dissolution. To that end, entry into both first and second marriages and nonmarital unions is discussed as well as the factors associated with entry into each type of union. The extent to which cohabitational unions result in marriage and in separation is examined. In addition, the rate of dissolution of cohabitations is compared with that of marriages. The effect of cohabitation on the probability of entry into marriage is then explored in detail using a multivariate hazard model. Finally, some of the social and legal implications of cohabitation are discussed. Data from the 1980 Women in Sweden Survey and the 1977 Norwegian Fertility Survey are used in the analyses.
The findings indicate that the traditional sequence of relatively early entry into legal marriage followed by childbearing is no longer the course followed by the majority of women in Sweden. Among recent Swedish cohorts, the overwhelming majority of women cohabit before marriage and these nonmarital unions are less likely to result in marriage than such unions in earlier cohorts. In addition, the association of legal marriage with childbearing has become weaker. Among women who became pregnant while cohabiting after 1970, only about one third were legally married before the birth of the child compared to about two thirds among women who became pregnant before 1970.
In Norway, similar trends are observed but are less extreme and seem to have begun somewhat later.
The analysis of the effect of cohabitation on the probability of marriage indicates that while overall marriage rates have fallen, cohabitation at a particular age increases the likelihood of marriage at that age. These results are discussed in relation to the notion of cohabitation as a trial marriage.
