ABSTRACT
A distinctive feature of the emergence in many Western nations of young adulthood as a new life stage has been the rise of independent non-familial living arrangements, including living alone and living with peers in shared housing. This chapter considers some of the alternative living arrangements experienced by single young adults in their twenties and early thirties, focusing in particular on shared households. The experiences of young adults living in the UK form the primary focus, although some of the issues discussed here are applicable elsewhere, including Australia, North America and parts of Northern Europe. Until relatively recently, research on young people and household formation has focused largely on processes of leaving and returning to the parental home (e.g. Jones, 1995; Goldscheider and Goldscheider, 1999; Holdsworth and Morgan, 2005), with much less attention paid to young people’s living arrangements once having left. The tracking of young people’s domestic transitions in terms of movement from the parental household towards their own families has tended to prioritise couple households as markers of ‘authentic adulthood’. Yet this is a historically myopic view of the link between leaving home and ‘settling down’, as a broader historical perspective highlights that the relatively low median age of first marriage during the immediate post-war years (most strikingly in the early 1960s) was in fact an anomaly, and the close link between home leaving and marriage certainly no longer pertains. In the UK, for example, the mean age of first marriage rose from 24.9 for men and 22.9 for women in 1972 to 32.4 and 30.3 for men and women respectively in 2012 (ONS, 2014). Similar trends in later marriage have emerged across Europe, albeit varying significantly in degree between Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe (Mandic, 2008), as well as in the USA, Australia and in many other countries across the globe, including China and Japan (United Nations, 2011). In Australia, for example, less than one-third (29 per cent) of 18 to 34 year olds were, or had been, married in 2012, compared with 64 per cent in 1976 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2013). The shift towards later marriage is partly attributable in many countries to the growth of cohabitation, which for many has emerged as an alternative living arrangement prior to or instead of marriage. Cohabitation has not, however, simply replaced marriage as the primary reason for first leaving home in countries such as the UK and Australia, and the proportion of
young people first leaving home in order to create any form of couple household is declining. Instead, young adults now leave home for a variety of reasons, often linked to a desire for independence from the parental home, and experience a diverse range of living arrangements across their twenties, including living alone, in communal establishments such as hostels, foyers and student residences, and in shared households. Despite their ubiquity, alternative household forms such as these have largely been neglected in existing literature or tend only to acquire significance in as much as they are deemed to constitute a ‘buffer zone’ between the family of origin and the family of destination. Attainment of a couple household tends still to be constructed as the apex of a hierarchy of domestic arrangements to which all young adults should aspire (perhaps eclipsed only by the shadow of the ‘hard working family’ much loved by British politicians). From this perspective, the existence of alternative households is largely viewed as evidence of ‘delayed adulthood’, rather than a ‘new normal’ for many young adults today (see, for example, Bynner, 2005; Arnett 2006; but see also Woodman and Wyn 2014, who argue that the post-1970 generation constitutes a distinctive social generation). Couple relationships remain very important to young people, and most continue to aspire to and attach special status to couple households. Yet they also attach a variety of interpretations to the concepts of independence and adulthood, not necessarily regarding their attainment as synonymous with or contingent on living with a partner (Holdsworth and Morgan, 2005; Heath and Cleaver, 2003).
