cohabitation

I wrote this for my Marriage and Family Relations class this semester. It's a little dry, but that's a college research paper, isn't it? :)

Cohabitation and Marriage
Kim P
April 2007

Today many people of marriageable age, mainly those aged in their twenties and thirties, are choosing to cohabit. Cohabitation means that unmarried persons of either the same or opposite sex who are not related are living in the same household. The percentage of these couples has risen tenfold since 1960 and seventy-four percent since 1990. The percentage of unmarried couples has risen over 1200 percent since 1960, when there was one cohabiting couple for every ninety married couples. Today, there is one cohabiting couple for every twelve married couples, with over twenty-five percent of women ages twenty-five to thirty-nine cohabiting at the present time and forty-one percent aged fifteen to forty-four having cohabited at some point in their lives. Cohabitation is considered a threat to modern marriage, with just below fifty percent of cohabitating couples ever marrying, lowering the marriage rate the world over.