The Cohabitation Trap: Why Moving In Together Without Marriage Costs Black Families $250,000

Nobody wants to hear this, least of all the couples who have already made the decision, who are already splitting rent and sharing a bed and raising children in an arrangement they have convinced themselves is functionally identical to marriage without the paperwork. They will tell you, as millions of Americans across all racial groups now tell you, that marriage is “just a piece of paper,” that love is what matters, that the institution is outdated, that they don’t need the government’s permission to be a family. And they will mean every word of it. They will also be wrong, in ways that are measurable, documented, and devastating — and the devastation falls disproportionately on Black families, who can least afford the financial consequences of the choice they have been told is merely personal.

The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, which is the most comprehensive data set on American household wealth, has consistently shown that married couples accumulate approximately four times the wealth of cohabiting couples with similar incomes. Four times. This is not a marginal difference attributable to self-selection bias or demographic confounds. Researchers who have controlled for income, education, age, and employment status still find that the wealth gap between married and cohabiting households is enormous, persistent, and growing. For Black Americans, whose median household wealth is already a fraction of white household wealth, the decision to cohabit rather than marry is not a lifestyle preference. It is a wealth-destruction mechanism operating at the precise point where the community can least afford to lose ground.

The $250,000 Number

The quarter-million-dollar figure in the title of this article is not hyperbole. It is a conservative estimate derived from the wealth accumulation data comparing married and cohabiting couples over a twenty-year period. Married couples benefit from a legal and economic infrastructure that cohabiting couples do not have access to, and the cumulative effect of those benefits compounds over time in ways that the couples themselves rarely understand until the relationship ends — by choice or by death — and the absence of legal protection becomes suddenly, catastrophically real.

Consider the mechanisms. Married couples file joint tax returns, which in most income configurations produces a lower effective tax rate than two individual returns. Married couples have automatic rights of inheritance; if one partner dies without a will, the surviving spouse inherits. Cohabiting partners inherit nothing unless a will explicitly provides for them, and even then, the will can be contested by blood relatives. Married couples can share employer-provided health insurance; cohabiting partners in many states and many employment contexts cannot. Married couples can make medical decisions for each other; cohabiting partners are legal strangers in the eyes of hospitals. Married couples have access to Social Security survivor benefits; cohabiting partners receive nothing.

Each of these individual benefits may seem modest. Together, over the course of a twenty-year relationship, they produce a wealth differential that is measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. And because Black Americans are more likely to cohabit and less likely to marry than any other racial group in the United States — the Black marriage rate has fallen to approximately 30 percent, down from 64 percent in 1950 — the aggregate effect on community wealth is staggering.

The Instability Tax

The wealth gap between married and cohabiting couples is not solely a function of legal benefits. It is also a function of stability, and the stability data is unforgiving. Children born to cohabiting parents are approximately five times more likely to experience their parents’ separation than children born to married parents. This is not because cohabiting couples love each other less or try less hard. It is because cohabitation, as a social institution, carries less weight, fewer formal barriers to exit, and less community and institutional support than marriage. The transaction costs of ending a cohabiting relationship are lower than the transaction costs of ending a marriage, and in economics as in relationships, lower exit costs produce higher exit rates.

Every separation is a wealth-destruction event. It is the splitting of a household into two households, each of which costs more to maintain than the shared one. It is the duplication of rent, utilities, insurance, and childcare. It is the legal costs associated with custody disputes, which for unmarried parents often lack the structured processes that family courts provide for divorcing spouses. It is the disruption to children’s education, stability, and emotional development, which has downstream economic effects that researchers are still quantifying. The cohabitation instability premium — the additional wealth destruction attributable to the higher breakup rate — compounds the direct legal and financial disadvantages into a total cost that no family, and certainly no community already suffering from a massive wealth gap, can afford to absorb.

Why Black Couples Are Not Marrying

The decline in Black marriage rates is not a mystery, and it is not, despite what cultural commentators on both sides suggest, primarily a matter of values. The economists Kerwin Kofi Charles and Ming Ching Luoh have documented that the Black marriage rate correlates strongly with the ratio of marriageable Black men to Black women, and that ratio has been devastated by mass incarceration, premature death, and unemployment. In many communities, there are simply not enough employed, non-incarcerated Black men to provide the marriage partners that Black women need. When you imprison a generation of men, you destroy a generation of marriages. This is arithmetic, not culture.

But economics also plays a direct role. Research by Fenaba Addo and Daniel Lichter has shown that debt — particularly student loan debt and consumer debt — is a significant barrier to marriage for Black couples. Many couples delay marriage because they feel they cannot afford a wedding, conflating the cost of a ceremony with the legal act of marriage itself. Others delay because one partner has a criminal record that creates employment barriers, or because the child support system would reallocate the household’s resources away from the children they are raising together. The barriers are real, and they are structural, and they require structural solutions.

The Cultural Normalization Problem

And yet. Having named the structural barriers, having acknowledged that mass incarceration and economic exclusion have made marriage harder for Black couples, we must also name the cultural shift that has made marriage seem less necessary. The phrase “we don’t need a piece of paper” has become so common in Black discourse that it functions as conventional wisdom, and it is conventional wisdom that costs the people who repeat it a quarter of a million dollars. It is a phrase that sounds liberated and functions as a trap.

The cultural devaluation of marriage in Black America is not organic. It is the downstream effect of fifty years of policy failure — welfare rules that penalized marriage, incarceration that removed potential husbands, economic exclusion that made men feel unworthy of the institution — that has been repackaged as a cultural choice. What began as an adaptation to impossible circumstances has been elevated into a philosophy, and the philosophy is bankrupting the community. When a Black woman tells her daughter that she doesn’t need a man and a piece of paper, she is transmitting the accumulated trauma of a policy environment that made marriage impossible and calling it wisdom. And her daughter will pay for that wisdom with a lifetime of reduced wealth accumulation, reduced legal protection, and reduced household stability.

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
— Toni Morrison

Morrison’s words apply here with a precision she may not have intended. The freedom to choose cohabitation over marriage is real, and it should be protected. But freedom without information is not freedom. It is manipulation by omission. And the information that cohabiting couples are not receiving — about the wealth gap, about the instability rates, about the legal vulnerability, about the long-term consequences for their children — is information that would change many of their decisions if they had it.

Practical Pathways to Marriage

The solution is not to shame people into marriage. Shame has never produced a stable household. The solution is to remove the barriers that prevent willing couples from marrying and to provide the information that helps couples understand what they are giving up when they choose not to.

First, the cost barrier. A marriage license costs between $30 and $100 in most states. A courthouse wedding costs nothing beyond the license. The average American wedding costs $30,000, and the conflation of marriage with an expensive wedding is one of the most destructive financial myths in the culture. Community organizations, churches, and civic groups could normalize the courthouse wedding, the small ceremony, the marriage that begins with a license and a commitment rather than a reception and a debt.

Second, the legal barrier. For couples where one partner has child support obligations from a previous relationship, marriage can trigger changes in income calculations that increase the obligation. This is a real and legitimate concern, and it requires policy reform at the state level. Several states have begun to address this by excluding a new spouse’s income from child support calculations, and this reform should be universal.

Third, the educational barrier. Most couples who cohabit do not understand the legal differences between their arrangement and marriage. Financial literacy programs, community education initiatives, and even simple informational campaigns could make the $250,000 cost of cohabitation visible to the people who are paying it without knowing. The Community Healthy Marriage Initiative, funded by the Administration for Children and Families, produced measurable improvements in relationship quality and marital intentions among low-income couples, demonstrating that when the information is provided in a supportive context, couples respond.

What the Children Experience

The adults in a cohabiting relationship are making a choice, and they are entitled to make it. The children are not making a choice. They are experiencing the consequences of a decision they had no part in, and those consequences are severe. Beyond the fivefold increase in the probability of parental separation, children in cohabiting households are more likely to experience household complexity — the cycling of partners in and out of the home — which is one of the strongest predictors of behavioral problems, academic underperformance, and emotional instability in childhood. The Fragile Families study, which tracked children born to unmarried parents across twenty major cities, found that by age five, approximately 63 percent of children born to cohabiting parents had experienced a change in family structure, compared to approximately 16 percent of children born to married parents.

These children did not choose instability. They were born into it, and they will carry its effects — in their academic performance, in their earning capacity, in their own relationship patterns — for the rest of their lives. The decision to cohabit rather than marry is not just a piece of paper. It is a statistical bet on the stability of a child’s world, and the odds are not in the child’s favor.

A Call for Honesty, Not Judgment

I understand the resistance to this message. I understand that for many Black Americans, the institution of marriage carries historical baggage — from the era when enslaved people were denied the right to marry, through the decades when economic exclusion made marriage unattainable, to the present day when mass incarceration has decimated the pool of available partners. I understand that telling a community that has been systematically denied access to an institution that it should now embrace that institution feels tone-deaf at best and cruel at worst.

But the data does not care about our feelings, and it does not grade on a historical curve. Married couples build more wealth. Their children are more stable. Their households are more durable. These findings hold across race, across income level, across educational attainment. They are among the most consistent findings in all of social science, and they hold for Black families with the same force that they hold for everyone else. The question is not whether marriage matters. It is whether we will allow the barriers that prevent Black couples from marrying to stand unchallenged, and whether we will allow the cultural mythology that marriage doesn’t matter to go uncorrected, while a community that already owns eight cents for every dollar of white wealth continues to hemorrhage the wealth it has.

The piece of paper is not just a piece of paper. It is a legal shield. It is a wealth-building tool. It is a stability platform for children. And it is available, right now, for the cost of a license fee, to every couple that chooses to use it. The barriers are real, and they should be removed. The cultural myths are powerful, and they should be corrected. And the children who will grow up in the households where these decisions are made deserve adults who have access to the data before they make them. That is not judgment. It is information. And the cost of withholding it is $250,000 and a generation of children’s stability.