Cohabitation in the marriage strategies of modern youth

Abstract

The article reveals the problem of the spread of cohabitation among young people as part of the modernization changes taking place in the field of family and marriage institutions. The problem is considered in the context of the existence of two opposing points of view, shared by experts in the field of family sociology, regarding the consequences of the spread of informal marital unions for the existence of family and marriage institutions.: as a crisis of family values and family structure, or as a natural process that meets the needs of modern society. Based on the analysis of data from the All-Russian population censuses of 2002, 2010 and 2021, social statistics data and the results of the author's sociological research aimed at identifying the attitude of young people to informal marital unions (n=190), it is concluded that youth cohabitation should be considered as a variant of the norm, and not a marker of the crisis of family and marriage. Thus, based on data from the All-Russian population censuses, it was found that informal marital unions are most common among young Russians under the age of 24, while in older age cohorts the proportion of informal marriages has been significantly decreasing over the past 20 years. According to the author's sociological research, about 76 % of respondents consider living together with a potential spouse as a significant condition for further marriage decisions, which 64.2 % of respondents include in their life plans. It is concluded that cohabitation becomes either a tool of marital selection, or a "buffer stage" that allows accumulating the necessary material and social benefits for further entry into official marital relations.