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ten years. More recent data shows increasing longevity of these relationships.
14
For example, the percent of cohabiting unions of women in their first cohabitation that

survived at least five years nearly doubled from the 1980s (23%) to 2006-12 (43%).
15
This was even more marked for women who had children during the cohabitation.

Duration also varies by group, with older couples staying together much longer on
average.

Duration of cohabitation is important to its legal treatment for a variety of
reasons. Having established that these couples rely upon one another economically,

the length of their relationship is clearly central to the degree of reliance they have upon
one another. Confident that the relationship will last, cohabitants may have taken many
steps that will prove harmful to them if it does not. As in marriage, for example,

has one left the workforce or had children in reliance on the relationship continuing?
3. Presence of children in cohabiting households

Another fact about cohabitants that is central to deciding how the law should
treat them is that a large number of them live in households with children: 54% of all

cohabiting couples have children in the home (as compared to 77% of married couples).
16
About two thirds of those children were living with their two biological or adoptive

cohabiting parents, and one third with one biological parent and a cohabitant
in the position of a stepparent. As early as the 1990s, it was estimated that 40% of
all children in the U.S. would spend time in a cohabiting household by the age of 16.
17
Based on the distribution of cohabitation within the population, more of these children
will be African American or Hispanic American than non-Hispanic white.

14 Larry L. Bumpass, What’s Happening to the Family? Interactions Between Demographic and
Institutional Change, 27 Demography 483, 487 (1990); U.S. Dep’t of Health and Human Services, Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, Nat’l Center for Health Statistics, Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage
in the United States: Data from the National Survey of Family Growth 4, 49 (2002 (Table 15).
15 Esther O. Lamidi et al., Change in the Stability of First Premarital Cohabitation Among Women in the
United States, 1983-2013, 56 Demography 427, 435-40 (2019).
16 See Horowitz et al., note 3 above, at 20.
17 Larry Bumpass & Hsien-Hen Lu, Trends in Cohabitation and Implications for Children’s Family Contexts
in the United States, 54 Population Studies 29, 35 (2000).

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