The Social Contexts of Cohabitation

Abstract

Recently, while visiting an Oxford college, I attended a rather formal luncheon at which most of the other participants were distinguished middle-aged legal authorities. The conversation turned to recent changes in laws dealing with the family and cohabitation. I was surprised to learn that the three gentlemen I was talking to were speaking of cohabitation from personal experience. Somehow, I had naively assumed that English legal circles were less socially advanced than those of Berkeley or Sweden. The incident illustrates the wide acceptance of a behavior pattern which was unheard of in respectable society only a few years ago. If some estimates are correct, a majority of the population in the future may cohabit at some point in their lives. The emergence of what used to be known as living in sin into middle class society is one of the most striking aspects of the social and sexual revolution of the past decade or so. Of course, men and women have lived together since time immemorial without benefit of legal marriage. In most times and places, marriages have been a matter of custom and religion, not of the state and its legal system. Further, legal systems have often given some form of official recognition to informal marriage. Recently, social scientists have been raising the question whether cohabitation is a completely new practice, or simply an extension of older forms of behavior such as common law trial marriage or the kind of informal arrangement that used to be called shacking up. Also, these scholars have been concerned with the impact of cohabitation on traditional marriage, especially whether it is a threat to that institution.