About three-quarters (77%) of adults ages 38 to 43 have lived with an unmarried romantic partner at some point in their lives, including 37% who have lived with two or more different partners, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released on August 12. The finding, drawn from longitudinal tracking data spanning more than two decades, shows that living together before or outside of marriage has become the norm in American relationship life.
A panel study built for accuracy
Pew researchers analyzed data from a Bureau of Labor Statistics study known as the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), which has followed the same people since 1997, when they were 12 to 17 years old, and asks about topics including their romantic partners, living arrangements, and marital status.
Analyses are limited to adults who responded in 2023, the most recent wave. Interviews were conducted from September 2023 to September 2024.
At each interview, conducted every year or two, respondents report the months they started and ended their cohabitations. Because these details are collected regularly throughout adulthood, they are likely to be more accurate than asking people to remember all their past unmarried partnerships when they are in their late 30s or early 40s.
That methodological advantage matters for a subject where retrospective memory is known to be unreliable.
Who has lived with how many partners
More than three-quarters of adults in the United States have, by their early 40s, lived with a partner they are not married to, the Pew report found. More than a third of adults have lived with two or more partners.
The 77% figure covers cohabitation of any length, not just brief arrangements, and includes people who went on to marry that partner as well as those who did not.
Cohabitation and marriage patterns differ widely by education, race and ethnicity. Cohabitation rates varied by education: about 82% of adults with a high school diploma or less had lived with an unmarried partner, compared with 78% of those with some college education and 70% of those with at least a bachelor’s degree. The sharper divide shows up in what happens next.
Education shapes what cohabitation leads to
Among adults who have ever cohabited, 77% of those with at least a bachelor’s degree married a partner they lived with, compared with 66% of those with some college education and 59% of those with a high school diploma or less.
Among adults without a four-year degree, cohabiting relationships are less likely to convert into marriage and more likely to end in a breakup or continue as a long-term unmarried partnership.
The findings land against a backdrop of significant shifts in how Americans form and sequence their relationships. Research on adult social bonds has repeatedly shown that proximity and shared living environments accelerate attachment, and cohabitation represents the most intensive version of that dynamic for romantic partners.
Separately, the 2026 State of Our Unions report is an annual report produced by the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University and the Institute for Family Studies on the health of marriage and family life in America. The 2026 report examined contemporary dating trends using the 2025 National Dating Landscape Survey, a nationally representative sample of 5,275 unmarried young adults ages 22, 35 in the United States. Only about 30% of respondents reported that they were dating, either casually or exclusively, suggesting a growing gap between the desire for partnership and the steps being taken to pursue it.
The broader picture of American partnership
Separate SSRS polling from early 2026 finds that 37% of US adults have used an online dating site or app at some point in their lives, with 6% currently using one. Half of adults who have ever used a dating app say they have been in a committed relationship with someone they met through one.
The cohabitation data provides a longer-run view of where many of those connections eventually lead.
The 2026 State of Our Unions report found that young adults reported significant financial and social/emotional barriers to dating. The biggest barrier they expressed was not having enough money, endorsed by more than half (52%) of respondents, 58% of men and 46% of women. Money concerns are not just future-abstract in the sense of reaching a certain financial status to be able to marry; they are current and tangible, about affording actual dates to explore serious relationships.
For couples who do move in together, shared housing costs can reduce that financial friction, which researchers say may itself be a driver of the cohabitation trend’s continued growth.
The full Pew Research Center analysis is available at PewResearch.org.
