Here's what some well-respected experts are saying about cohabitation, marriage, and family diversity.

Experts' comments:
On cohabitation and people who choose not to marry
On the changing role of marriage
On the definition of family
On commitment in unmarried relationships
On whether marriage should be promoted as the ideal family structure
On helping families, both married and unmarried
On the allegation that cohabitation increases the risk of divorce
On the claim that children do better if their parents are married
On the claim that people should get married because married people make more money than cohabitors
On the claim that married people live longer than unmarried ones
On why people live together before marriage
On the history of cohabitation

On cohabitation and people who choose not to marry:

"Co-habitation without children or marriage needs to be viewed not only as a legitimate end-state in itself, but also as a legitimate form of pre-marriage."
- William Pinsof, family psychologist and President of the Family Institute at Northwestern University, in Family Process, vol. 41, no. 2, 2002

"Policymakers need to clarify how cohabiting families are treated and recognize cohabitation as a potentially viable family form."
- Wendy Manning, Bowling Green State University sociologist, in "The Implications of Cohabitation for Children's Well-Being," in Just Living Together, 2002

"Cohabiting unions may be an end in themselves for an increasing percentage of cohabitors. These cohabitors do not necessarily reject marriage. Instead, cohabitors are less likely to see marriage as the defining characteristic of their family lives."
- Judith Seltzer, University of California sociologist, in "Families Formed Outside of Marriage," Journal of Marriage and the Family, November 2000.

"Rarely does social change occur with such rapidity. Indeed, there have been few developments relating to marriage and family life which have been as dramatic as the rapid increase in unmarried cohabitation."
- Paul Glick and Graham Spanier, "Married and Unmarried Cohabitation in the United States, Journal of Marriage and the Family, February 1980

On the changing role of marriage:

"As an adult stage in the life course, marriage is shrinking. Americans are living longer, marrying later, exiting marriage more quickly, and choosing to live together before marriage, after marriage, in-between marriages, and as an alternative to marriage. A small but growing percentage of American adults will never marry."
- David Popenoe, Co-Director, National Marriage Project, House Ways and Means testimony May 22, 2001

"Although marriage remains an important feature of adulthood, it no longer looms like Mount Everest in the landscape of the adult life course. It is more like a hill that people climb, up and down, once or twice, or bypass altogether."
- David Popenoe, Co-Director, National Marriage Project, House Ways and Means testimony May 22, 2001

On the definition of family:

"It can be argued that residence/degree of physical proximity is actually becoming more significant than is legal [marital] status in terms of understanding and intervening in close relationships."
- John Scanzoni et al., in The Sexual Bond: Rethinking Families and Close Relationships, 1989

"At the core of this process is a basic redefinition of family from a unit defined exclusively by blood and procreation, to a unit increasingly defined by intentionality -- what the participants intend."
- William Pinsof, family psychologist and President of the Family Institute at Northwestern University, in Family Process, vol. 41, no. 2, 2002

"For centuries, the 'family' has been equated with 'marriage' both in the public eye and in our legal system. ... Recent trends in cohabitation have indicated that the traditional definition of the family must be expanded beyond marriage to include unmarried cohabitations. Disregarding cohabiting unions in defining the family seriously misrepresents the reality of Canadian family life."
- Zheng Wu, sociologist at the University of Victoria, in Cohabitation: An Alternative Form of Family Living, Oxford University Press, 2000

"[Marriage can only] be treated as an important variable rather than the defining characteristic of families: the social interactions that constitute co-residential family life are not created by civil registration."
- Larry Bumpass, R, Kelly Raley, and James Sweet, sociologists and demographers, in "The Changing Character of Stepfamilies: Implications of Cohabitation and Nonmarital Childbearing," Demography, 1995

On commitment in unmarried relationships:

"There are not monolithic categories called 'cohabitations' on the one hand, and 'marriages' on the other. There is a great deal of variation within each type of relationship in terms of commitment. And John [the caller on a radio show, who has been in a nine-year unmarried relationship with three children] is telling us about a relationship with a very extreme and long-term commitment. And there are many marriages that break up within the first couple of years following marriage because of an absense of such commitment."
- Larry Bumpass, University of Wisconsin sociologist and demographer, on NPR's Talk of the Nation, November 11, 1998 "The extent to which cohabitation on average appears to be somewhere in between dating and marriage on various indicators may be because cohabiting relationships are split between those that are much like marriage, and those that are very little like marriage."
- Philip Cohen, U.S. Bureau of the Census, in a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, 1999

"Committed cohabiting relationships seem to confer many of the benefits of marriage."
- William Doherty, Professor, Department of Family Social Science, University of Minnesota, at the Council on Contemporary Families conference, April 27, 2001

On whether marriage should be promoted as the ideal family structure:

"In the end, the evidence suggests that the benefits of marriage promotion would be marginal." - Andrew Cherlin, John Hopkins University sociologist, in Contexts , a publication of the American Sociological Association, Fall 2003

"People living in a particular pair-bond structure [marriage or cohabitation] should not be advantaged, nor should their offspring. Social policies must be based on respect for people's right to choose -- to live alone or to live within any particular pair-bond structure."
- William Pinsof, family psychologist and President of the Family Institute at Northwestern University, in Family Process, vol. 41, no. 2, 2002

"My strong objection is to the notion that there's one kind of relationship that's best for everyone, that it's a moral failing if you don't achieve it, and that it will irreparably harm your children if you don't marry or if your marriage doesn't last."
- Judith Stacey, University of Southern California sociologist, in The Bergen Record, August 13, 2000

"Giving incentives or creating pressures for unstable couples to wed can be a huge mistake. It may create families with high conflict and instability -- the worst-case scenario for kids."
- Stephanie Coontz, national co-chair, Council on Contemporary Families, and a family historian at Evergreen State College, in Newsweek, May 28, 2001

"As young adults consider pair-bonding, they need to be freely able to choose the pair-bond [marriage or cohabitation] that best fits who they are and where they want to go."
- William Pinsof, family psychologist and President of the Family Institute at Northwestern University, in Family Process, vol. 41, no. 2, 2002

"There is only so far you can go to shore up marriage without reviving its repressive aspects."
- Stephanie Coontz, national co-chair, Council on Contemporary Families, in USA Today, June 29, 2000

"We cannot afford to play favorites with first-time married couples. There are too many other circumstances into which children are being born."
- Stephanie Coontz, family historian at Evergreen State College, speaking at the Council on Contemporary Families conference, April 2001

"The positive thing that conservative groups have done is to emphasize the importance of committed relationships and the involvement of both parents in raising a child. But the fact is that people can do that without being legally married. If what they decide to do is emphasize these values, not the demographics of the families in question, they will survive. But if they insist on this notion that only people who are married with children meet this criteria, they will find themselves obsolete."
- Nancy Folbre, University of Massachusetts at Amherst economist, in Salon.com June 7, 2001

"I favor healthy marriages, and I favor healthy un-marriages."
- Don Bloch, past president of the American Family Therapy Association, in USA Today, June 29, 2000

On helping families, both married and unmarried:

"If we're concerned with the well-being of families with children, we may have to rethink our policies in ways that will allow us to provide adequate benefits for families that don’t meet the formal marriage definitions that have prevailed in the past."
- Larry Bumpass, University of Wisconsin sociologist and demographer, on NPR's Talk of the Nation, November 11, 1998

"[Social policy makers] could attempt to create policies to support and help people in whatever type of social structures they create, giving equal credence and respect to divorced and married people, cohabiting and married couples, to children born out of wedlock and children born to married couples, and to married and unmarried parents. From a psychological viewpoint, it is hard to imagine the value of defining any major social group that is not physically or emotionally harming itself or others as deviant or undesirable."
- William Pinsof, family psychologist and President of the Family Institute at Northwestern University, in Family Process, vol. 41, no. 2, 2002

"Treat [unmarried parents with new babies] as a couple, and give them the job training and economic support that will enable them to implement what they say they want to do. You have to do a lot more than issue them marriage licenses to bring them up to the married norm."
- Sara McLanahan, Princeton University researcher's policy recommendations regarding the unmarried families she studies. Speaking at the Council on Contemporary Families conference, April 2001

"We can encourage, pressure, preach, and give incentives to get people to marry. But we still have to deal with the reality that kids are going to be raised in a variety of ways, and we have to support all kinds of families with kids."
- Stephanie Coontz, national co-chair, Council on Contemporary Families, and a family historian at Evergreen State College, in Newsweek, May 28, 2001

"At a minimum, the four arrangements listed above [cohabitation without children, cohabitation with children, marriage, and elder pair-bonding] need to be recognized as legitimate pair-bond structures that fulfill important functions for their participants.
- William Pinsof, family psychologist and President of the Family Institute at Northwestern University, in Family Process, vol. 41, no. 2, 2002

"There is no evidence that, once adjustment is made for socio-economic status, the family created by cohabitation outside marriage performs the familial functions significantly less adequately than the family sanctioned by a legal marriage. Thus it is submitted that for the health of society equal protection and support should be given to all types of social groupings which provide the child's needs."
- Tapp, P., "The Social and Legal Position of Children of Unmarried but Cohabiting Parents," in Marriage and Cohabitation in Contemporary Societies: Areas of Legal, Social and Ethical Change, 1980.

On the allegation that cohabitation increases the risk of divorce:

"The most sophisticated studies have found that, although cohabitation engenders somewhat more liberal attitudes toward divorce, it does not increase the likelihood of marital disruption."
- Final report prepared for the Department of Health and Human Services by Abt Associates. "The Determinants of Marriage and Cohabitation Among Disadvantaged Americans: Research Findings and Needs." Marriage and Family Formation Data Analysis Project, March 2003.

"The problem with this research is that it does not adequately account for selection -- people who choose to live together before marriage are not the same people who choose to marry directly. They comprise at least two different groups with different attitudes toward marriage, religion, and relationships in general. ... To attribute premarital cohabitors' higher subsequent divorce rate and non-premarital-cohabitors' lower subsequent divorce rate to the fact that they did and did not cohabit before they married is unwarranted and bad science."
- William Pinsof, family psychologist and President of the Family Institute at Northwestern University, in Family Process, vol. 41, no. 2, 2002

"Claims that individuals who cohabit before marriage hurt their chances of a good marriage pay too little attention to this evidence [research showing that it is likely other factors, not cohabitation, that create the apparent difference in divorce rates]."
- Judith Seltzer, University of California sociologist, in "Families Formed Outside of Marriage," Journal of Marriage and the Family, November 2000.

"The most consistent and strongest predictor of whether a given couple will divorce is not whether or not they cohabited, but the age at which they got married. People who get married younger have significantly higher divorce rates than couples who marry older.
- Teachman, Jay and Polonko, Karen. "Cohabitation and Marital Stability in the United States." Social Forces, 1990.

On the claim that children do better if their parents are married:

"What matters for children is not whether their parents are married when they are born but whether their parents live together while the children are growing up."
- Sara McLanahan, "Growing Up Without a Father," in Lost Fathers: The Politics of Fatherlessness in America, edited by Cynthia Daniels, 1998.

"All different kinds of structures work for kids, as long as there's love, adequate supervision, structure and consistency."
- Barbara Howard, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins University in Newsweek, May 28, 2001

"I don't assume that men and women have to be married or living together to produce a healthy child, but they do need to learn how to work together and we don't have a system that encourages that."
- Ronald Mincy, a Columbia University professor of social work, on Salon.com August 9, 2001

"The most careful studies and the most careful researchers confirm what most of us know from our own lives: The quality of any family's relationships and resources readily trumps its formal structure or form. Access to economic, educational, and social resources; the quality and consistency of parental nurturance, guidance, and responsibility; and the degree of domestic harmony, conflict, and hostility affect child development and welfare far more substantially than does the particular number, gender, sexual orientation, and marital status of parents or the family structure in which children are reared."
- Judith Stacey, "Dada-ism in the 1990s: Getting Past Baby Talk About Fatherlessness," in Lost Fathers: The Politics of Fatherlessness in America, edited by Cynthia Daniels, 1998.

On the claim that people should get married because married people make more money than cohabitors:

"Gainful employment," said Daniel Lichter, director of Pennsylvania State University's Population Research Institute, can turn a man or woman into a potential bride or groom pretty quickly."
- From an article by Raphael Lewis in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Is That Love in the Air? More People Are Saying I Do," April 19, 1998, suggesting that money encourages people to get married rather than marriage giving people more money

"We find that the wage premium [the average amount married people make beyond what cohabitors make] can be explained largely in terms of unobservable individual characteristics which are positively correlated with marriage and wages. In other words, attributes leading to 'good' (long and stable) marriages are also important in obtaining 'good' (long and stable) jobs and higher wages."
- Christopher Cornwall and Peter Rupert, in Economic Inquiry, April 1997. Based on longitudinal data.

On the claim that married people live longer than unmarried ones:

"We found that cohabitation status was a stronger predictor of mortality than marital status, and that the latter showed no independent association to mortality. ... We suggest that in future studies of social relations and mortality, cohabitation status is considered to replace marital status since it may account for more of the variation in mortality."
- Rikke Lund, Pernille Due, Jens Modvig, Bjorn Holstein, Morgens Damsgaard, and Per Anderson in Social Science and Medicine, 2002 (vol. 55, pages 673-79), suggesting that people who live with a partner live longer on average, regardless of their marital status.

On why people live together before marriage:

"Paradoxically, more people today value marriage. They take it seriously. That's why they're more likely to cohabit. They want to make sure before they take the ultimate step."
- Frank Furstenberg, sociologist at University of Pennsylvania, in Newsweek May 28, 2001

"Today it's unusual if you don't live with someone before you marry them."
- Andrew Cherlin, sociologist at John Hopkins University and author of Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, in Newsweek May 28, 2001

On the history of cohabitation:

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