Fewer people marry and more people live together instead.

In 2001 the lowest number of marriages took place in the UK since records began.

An increase in the number of adults living with a partner (cohabiting). In 2001-2 quater of all non married adults aged 16-59 were cohabiting.

Social trends statistics show that living with a partner doesn't mean you won't get married- it's often just a delay tying the knot. A third of people who cohabited with a partner went on to marry them.

The majority of people in the UK do marry but the proportion who are married at any one time has fallen.

Reasons why these trends have developed are that men tend to die before women. Elderly widows make up a lot of single person households. There are more old people these days, so this helps explain why there are so many single person households. New right theorists believe that the decline in marriage means a decline in traditional family values. However, evidence suggests cohabiting families actually have similar norms and values to married ones. Postmodern theorists say the role of intimate relationships has changed - the emphasis is less on having kids and more on self-expression and emotional fulfilment. Giddens (1992) says that people are getting more likely to have a series of cohabitations rather than a lifelong marriage, this is known as serial monogomy.