Cohabitation and marriage in Britain since the 1970s

Abstract

We present in this chapter a statistical overview of levels and trends in marriage and cohabitation in Britain in recent decades. Family change is one of the most prominent social trends of recent times in Britain as in other developed countries, including both Eastern and Southern Europe.² Among the most striking developments is the growth in prevalence of unmarried cohabitation. In the early 1960s in Britain fewer than one in a hundred adults under 50 are estimated to have been cohabiting at any one time,³ compared with one in six currently. Cohabitation has become a normal part of the life course, though not yet, according to General Household Survey (GHS) figures, a majority experience for all adults. In 2004-7, 61 per cent of men aged 25-44 and 64 per cent of women of this age had cohabited at some point in their lives; of those aged 45-59, 38 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women, had done so. Attitudes appear to have adapted to this change in behaviour. Cohabitation is no longer seen as socially deviant: for example, two-thirds of respondents to the 2006 British Social Attitudes survey thought that there was ‘little difference socially between being married and living together as a couple’. On the other hand, the vast majority of the same sample clearly saw a distinction between them, as fewer than one in ten agreed that there was ‘no point in getting married’, that it was ‘only a piece of paper’.⁴