Stephanie Marshall and her fiance, Kelton Scott, are college-educated, gainfully employed and living together. They pay their bills separately but "get together on common things like the rent," said Marshall, who just finished medical school in Atlanta.
The couple is part of a growing segment of American couples who choose to cohabit -- and a new report from the Pew Research Center, released Monday, says financially, those couples are making out like bandits compared to their married and single counterparts.
Not only are there more of them today -- the number of cohabiting couples has doubled since the 1990s, according to Pew analysis of U.S. Census numbers -- but they make more money than other segments of college graduates....
"Working" in more ways than one: Among the college-educated, the study said, in 78% of cohabiting couples, both partners had jobs. For college-educated married couples, only 67% were in two-earner marriages.
The report's findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom that says married people have it better economically than their unmarried counterparts.
"When we started writing this report, we thought that people who were married, and not those just living with each other, would be better off. But that's not the case," said D'Vera Cohn, the study's co-author.
I wonder if more people (especially men) want to live together because in a contractual marriage, the stakes are higher. How long will it be before there are "common marriage" laws that will make even living together more risky for a man--if he stays too long? Or will living together give men more freedom with less government regulation?
What do you think?
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