WETZSTEIN: Cohabitation rises for seniors

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By Cheryl Wetzstein

When the topic of cohabiting comes up, it's usually associated with the young and the restless.

But another segment of the population is increasingly sharing a bedroom while skipping the wedding vows: senior citizens.

As with many trends, it remains to be seen if senior cohabiting is beneficial, benign or benighted.

A paper by Susan L. Brown and Sayaka Kawamura at the Center for Family and Demographic Research at Bowling Green State University sheds some light on this understudied issue.

The issue is important, they write, because "the U.S. population is aging, and older adults are less likely to be married now and in the future than in the past."

Also, cohabitation is "accelerating among older adults," they say. Census data show that between 2000 and 2008, the number of cohabiting persons aged 50 and older almost doubled, from 1.2 million to 2.2 million.

Before anyone asks the "So what?" question, let's restate the merits of marriage, as they hold for elderly couples just as powerfully as they do for younger ones.

Married seniors "typically enjoy higher levels of physical and mental health" and "greater financial resources and social support" than unmarried seniors, Ms. Brown and Ms. Kawamura write in their paper, "Relationship Quality Among Cohabitors and Marrieds in Older Adulthood."

Research already shows that married people generally fare better than cohabiters, but almost all the studies focus on young couples. What about the seniors?

Ms. Brown and Ms. Kawamura tried to answer that question through data from the 2005-2006 National Social, Life, Health and Aging Project, a sample of 3,005 persons aged 57 to 85.