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Couple Formation is Prolonged not Postponed. New Paths to Union Formation in Contemporary France

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Abstract

In France, as in other European countries, the age at first cohabiting union has risen over the past decades, as a result of longer school enrolment, structural economic changes, and new family norms. While the median age at first co-resident couple was 23.8 for men born in France in the beginning of the 1950s, it was 26.0 among the generation born in the beginning of the 1970s. This tendency is often referred to as a postponement of couple formation and as a part of a broader delay in the transition to adulthood. This article argues, on the contrary, that couple formation has not been postponed but prolonged. In fact, age at first couple formation has remained stable across generations born since the mid-twentieth century in France. Starting from there, we take on a biographical approach to examine the nature, duration, and articulation of the successive stages that make up young people’s conjugal trajectories in France. What are the different pathways into couple life, and how have these changed over time? In order to answer these questions, we use optimal matching methods to identify ideal typical trajectories and then logistic regressions in order to see how these relate to generational differences as well as sociodemographic characteristics. We observe three traditional, three timeless and five new paths to couple life. The main historical change is the increasingly gradual nature of union formation, a trend that reflects a dual pattern. First, unions are progressively institutionalized: the time laps between different relationship stages, such as “going out,” “settling in,” and eventually marrying, have expanded. Second, young people increasingly experience several relationships during youth: the different steps of couple formation are taken with different partners. We conclude that couple formation is not delayed per se; it is rather the material and institutional formalization of unions that is put off for the future. We discuss the scientific and methodological implications of this finding.

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Data Availability

Data are available to researchers via Quetelet PROGEDO Diffusion.

Notes

  1. 20% of the oldest generation in the survey, born in 1948–1959, declared a first relationship that was non-cohabitant. 51% declared a first relationship that ended in separation and 9% a first relationship than ended within 18 months.

  2. The age span between 18 and 29 corresponds to a period when most individuals experience their first relationships and we thus focus on this period in life. However, the analysis takes into account any experiences that may have occurred before age 18. For instance, an individual who was single at age 18 but who experienced a first relationship and a first separation before this age will enter the observation window coded as “separated.” On the other hand, experiences that occurred after age 29 are not accounted for. In our sample, 70% of the respondents did not declare any new relationship after age 29, 22% declared one new relationship after this age, and 8% declared two or more relationships. Thus, our analysis does not cover the whole relationship trajectory but focuses on experiences among young adults.

  3. We use weights to calculate the partitioning, for the descriptive statistics and for the multinomial logistic regression.

  4. Among individuals aged 30 or more, 58% had experienced one relationship before age 30, 23% had experienced two, 10% had experienced three, and only 3% had experienced four or more relationships before this age.

  5. As a robustness check, we reproduced the analysis in the online appendix by creating a new state for unions in rank 3. In Figure A1, we evaluate the quality of different clustering solutions which led us to use the ward algorithm of 10 groups. The clusters resulting from the sequence analysis are presented in Figure A2. Results are very similar to those obtained by grouping unions of ranks greater than, or equal to, 2. Distinguishing between rank 2 and rank 3 or more has no obvious empirical or analytical interest and makes reading of the results more complicated by increasing the number of states.

  6. This last step is essential because a clustering will always produce a result (Levine, 2000; Studer, 2012) whether or not it makes sense in demographic or statistical terms.

  7. By increasing the number of groups, we obtain additional distinctions in transitions toward marriage or cohabitation, which are not central to our research question. Compared with Ward, choosing a PAM algorithm allows for the emergence of a group of individuals who stay single until the middle of the observation period. This is an interesting group since young people who are single up to the age of 25 do not have the same couple life trajectories as those remaining single up to the age of 30.

  8. By taking several groups into account, we are able to distinguish between those who stayed with the first partner for a long time on a LAT basis, those who did so for a short time and who separated, and those who made the transition to a more institutionalized form of couple.

  9. I “Higher Professionals and Managers”; II “Lower Professionals and Managers”; IIIa “Higher routine non-manual”; IIIb “Lower routine non-manual”; IV “Proprietors, artisans, farmers”; V “Lower technicians & supervisors”; VI “Skilled manual”; VII “Unskilled manual”.

  10. We also provide results for both genders combined in Table A1 in the online appendix.

  11. For more details see Gabadinho et al. (2011).

  12. For more details see Elzinga and Liefbroer (2007).

  13. In the following, in order to distinguish the descriptive statistics from the regression results, we express the marginal effects of the multinomial logit models by putting a + or – sign before the numbers.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Wilfried Rault, Arnaud-Régnier-Loilier, Mathieu Ichou, Christopher Leichtnam, and James Tovey, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their valuable advice.

Funding

The EPIC survey was carried out by INED and INSEE. EPIC benefited from the financial support of the French National Research Agency (CECHIC Project, ANR-12-CORP-0016–01), the Caisse nationale des allocations familiales (CNAF), the research and statistics department in the Ministry of Health (DREES), and the iPOPs Laboratory of Excellence (Individuals, Populations, Societies).

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    Marie Bergström & Léonard Moulin

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Bergström, M., Moulin, L. Couple Formation is Prolonged not Postponed. New Paths to Union Formation in Contemporary France. Eur J Population 38, 975–1008 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-022-09629-0

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