Partner Rights

Partners are typically defined as unmarried adult cohabitants who are emotionally and financially interdependent, have reached the age of consent, do not have a different domestic partner or spouse, and are in a long-term committed relationship. Despite the financial and legal disincentives, over the past 30 years, there has been an upward trend worldwide in industrialized countries in the number of unmarried partners cohabitating. Underlying this shift in living arrangements is the broad social and cultural shift from a society in which religious ideology encouraged social conformity regarding marriage to a more secular society in which individual choice, autonomy, and freedom are encouraged. The extension of legal rights around the world to opposite-sex and same-sex cohabitants has evolved unevenly and varies both among and within nations.

This broad cultural shift is reflected in the 2000 U.S. census: the number of households headed by cohabitating partners doubled from 1990 to 2000.

Cohabitating households make up slightly over 5 percent of all U.S. households and include 5.5 million people; there are minor children in 41 percent of these households. Currently, over half of all marriages are preceded by cohabitation in the United States.

The growth in the rate of cohabiting couples reflects changes in the institution of marriage and concerns about its stability over the life course. Marriage, once strongly fortified by law, religion, and economics, is being replaced by cohabitation. There is a growing movement in the United States to further the separation of church and state by privatizing marriage so that the word marriage no longer appears in any laws. This would eliminate any confusion created by the fact that the word marriage currently refers to both a legal status and a religious status.

The concern about cohabitation, particularly for the person with fewer resources, is that, unlike marriage, there is no obligation for the person with more resources to support their partner outside marriage by the contractual obligations of divorce should the relationship dissolve. Public policy has not kept pace with this shift in living arrangements and continues to support, preserve, and encourage marriage by reserving many rights and privileges to married persons. Cohabitants in most countries around the world are unclear about their legal rights in areas such as child custody, property ownership, healthcare access, responsibility for debt, and survivorship.

Only 50 years ago, it was illegal in the United States for adults to live together as loving partners. Today, many nations in Europe, North America, and South America extend rights through civil unions and registered partnerships to unwed couples. India's Supreme Court recently ruled that unmarried couples have the right to live together and, as part of its ruling, pointed out that “even the Hindu gods, Lord Krishna and Radha, were cohabitating lovers rather than man and wife.”

In the majority of northern European countries, cohabitation is an accepted new social institution. In several Scandinavian nations, cohabitating partners share nearly the same legal rights as their married counterparts. Denmark and Sweden are currently the world's “cohabitation leaders,” where cohabitants have the same rights and obligations in childcare, taxation, inheritance, and welfare benefits as married couples.

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