Marriage intentions among cohabiters

Cohabitation or living together in one household without being married in modern society is one of the defining features characterizing the transformations of the modern family, mentioned alongside late-age marriage, childbearing, or frequent divorces (Lesthaeghe, 2010). Marriage is still a major life transformation, but the pressure to marry today is lighter than ever before and many young couples start a family from cohabitation due to different socio-economical or cultural motives (Sassler and Lichter, 2020). In this article, I analyse the intentions of cohabiters to marry and the factors determining these intentions in Lithuania. The analysis focuses on the 2019 Family and Inequality Survey dataset, which collects rich information on birth cohorts 1970-1984 and lets to investigate cohabitation formation patterns on individuals, who are finished the most active partnership formation phase. Analysis of the data shows that most of the cohabiting individuals in the analyzed cohort in Lithuania have not decided on the registration of the marriage and do not know whether they will marry in the future. It can be stated that a larger proportion of cohabitators, who have decided not to marry are females, when a larger proportion of men, the opposite, intend to marry. Applied multinomial logistic regression model results show that in Lithuania the intentions of cohabiters to marry in the future are determined by their satisfaction with relationships, type of ownership and education levelSocialinių mokslų fakultetasVytauto Didžiojo universiteta