’The new normal’: Cohabitation on the rise, study finds

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Marisa Guzman-Aloia

Melissa Melms, 25, and Jonathan Mills, 29, moved into her Hoboken, N.J., apartment 18 months ago. Now they're engaged. Living together was an expected part of the journey, says Melms, who blogged about her experience.

By JoNel Aleccia, Senior Writer, NBC News

More women are choosing to live with men first without marriage and more of those relationships are lasting longer, according to a new government study that tracks the continuing climb of cohabitation in the U.S.

Nearly half of women in what researchers call "first unions" with men -- 48 percent -- moved in with no wedding vows according to interviews conducted between 2006 and 2010, up from 43 percent in 2002 and 34 percent in 1995.

About 40 percent of those relationships became marriages after three years, but about 32 percent continued as cohabitations, suggesting an important new role for the arrangement once known as “shacking up,” says one researcher.

“It’s becoming more acceptable to be in a long-term, committed relationship without a legal document,” says Pamela J. Smock, director and research professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

By the time they’re 20, 1 in 4 women ages 15 to 44 in the U.S. have lived with a man, and by the time they’re 30, that ratio climbs to 3 in 4, the new study shows.

“The question becomes not who cohabits, but who doesn’t?” Smock says.

The survey relies primarily on information from a sample of 12,279 women interviewed between 2006 and 2010 as part of the federal National Survey of Family Growth, with data from previous reports in 1995 and 2002.

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