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

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Demography

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.

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Notes

  1. Of the varying definitions of cohorts, I select the following for this article. Baby Boomers are individuals born between 1946 and 1964 and were age 30 between 1976 and 1994. Millennials are individuals born between 1980 and 1994, reaching age 30 between 2010 and 2024.

  2. The figure represents time spent in prison and not in jail.

  3. The term “cohabitation boom” might imply that there will be an explosive growth followed by a retreat akin to a baby boom. I use the term to focus on growth, and I am not suggesting that it is a temporary phenomenon.

  4. The NSFG supplied weights produce estimates weighted to the midpoint of the data collection years. The midpoint between 2011 and 2015 is 2013. Thus, the weighted estimates reflect the share of women with those experiences in 2013.

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Acknowledgments

The Population Association of America has provided an outstanding and welcoming intellectual home base over my career. I gratefully acknowledge my excellent colleagues at Bowling Green State University as well as my coauthors over the years for their amazing support. This work would not have been possible without all their insights and our interactions. My work on this address benefitted from the Center for Family and Demographic Research at Bowling Green State University, which has core funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2CHD0050959). Krista Payne was instrumental in the development of the figures and provided a great sounding board. I appreciate the excellent research and support provided by Kasey Eickmeyer and Paul Hemez.

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    Wendy D. Manning

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Manning, W.D. Young Adulthood Relationships in an Era of Uncertainty: A Case for Cohabitation. Demography 57, 799–819 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-020-00881-9

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