Relationship self-help has two shelves. One coaches you toward marriage — attract the right partner, fix your attachment style, get the ring. The other teaches you to be content alone, to stop treating singlehood as a problem to solve. Both shelves assume they know what single people want. A new peer-reviewed study says neither one does.

The Future Family Desires of Single Early Midlife Adults, published in the journal Family Transitions in 2026 by sociologists Susan L. Brown, Wendy D. Manning, and Karen Benjamin Guzzo, analyzed the 2023 Singlehood in America survey — 799 single adults ages 30 to 50. The question wasn’t “do you want to get married.” It was more granular than that: what do you actually want your relationship future to look like, if anything. The answers didn’t cluster into a marriage-track majority or a happily-single majority. They scattered.

Quick Verdict

Question	Answer
Who ran the study?	Susan L. Brown, Wendy D. Manning, and Karen Benjamin Guzzo, published in Family Transitions
Sample	799 single adults ages 30-50, from the 2023 Singlehood in America survey
What do single adults want most?	Cohabitation — desired by 38% of men and 29% of women, ahead of marriage
How many want marriage?	18% of men, 23% of women
How many want neither?	About 25% want no future cohabitation or marriage; another ~20% are uncertain — roughly a third total aren’t clearly headed toward partnership of any kind
What’s the catch?	A companion Pew analysis (Aug 2026) found most people who cohabit do eventually marry — so cohabitation isn’t a fixed alternative to marriage for everyone who wants it

Bottom line: There’s no single “single person” this data describes. The marriage-track and happily-single frameworks both flatten a group that actually splits at least four different ways.

What the Study Actually Tested

Brown, Manning, and Guzzo work out of Bowling Green State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and they’re not new to this territory — Manning and Guzzo have spent years publishing on cohabitation trends specifically. This study used the life course perspective, a sociological framework built on a simple idea: what happened to you earlier shapes what you want next. So they didn’t just ask 799 single adults what they wanted. They checked whether prior marriage, prior cohabitation, and having a child changed the answer.

Most of the sample had been married before, or had cohabited before, or both. About 80% already had at least one child. That history matters for reading the results — this isn’t a survey of twenty-somethings who haven’t gotten around to settling down yet. It’s early midlife adults, many of whom have already done marriage, or cohabitation, or parenting, and are describing what they want now, with that experience behind them.

Is It Normal to Not Want Marriage?

Yes, based on this data — and it’s not even the minority position. Here’s what the 799 respondents said about their future relationship goals:

1. Cohabitation was the single most-desired arrangement, wanted by 38% of men and 29% of women — ahead of marriage for both.
2. Marriage came in second, desired by 23% of women and 18% of men.
3. About a quarter of respondents wanted neither — no future cohabitation, no future marriage.
4. Roughly one in five were uncertain, without a clear preference either way.
5. Combined, close to a third of the sample wasn’t clearly on a path toward any future partnership, married or cohabiting.
6. Fertility desires ran even lower than partnership desires — only about 20% of women and 17% of men wanted a child in the future, which tracks with 80% already being parents.

No single answer cleared a majority. That’s the finding underneath the finding: heterogeneity isn’t a footnote here, it’s the headline. A relationship book that opens with “you want to find your person” is making a claim that fits maybe a quarter of this population.

Cohabitation Isn’t the Rebellious Alternative It Sounds Like

It’s tempting to read “cohabitation beats marriage” as single adults rejecting marriage outright. A companion Pew Research Center analysis, published August 12, 2026, complicates that read. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 — a panel that’s tracked the same Americans since their teens, which beats asking people to recall their twenties from memory — Pew found that 77% of adults ages 38 to 43 have lived with an unmarried romantic partner at some point. And most of them don’t stop there: two-thirds of people who ever cohabited eventually married a partner they’d lived with, most of them their first cohabiting partner.

The Washington Post’s coverage of the same data (Aug 17, 2026) is blunt about what this means: cohabitation isn’t replacing marriage for most Americans, it’s become the on-ramp to it. The split runs along education and race lines, too — adults with a bachelor’s degree who cohabited went on to marry that partner 77% of the time, versus 59% for those with a high school education or less. White adults who cohabited married that partner 73% of the time, versus 46% for Black adults.

Put the two studies together and the picture gets more interesting, not less. Some single adults who say they want cohabitation are describing a destination. Others are describing a stop on the way to marriage, whether they’d frame it that way or not. The Brown, Manning, and Guzzo survey can’t tell you which is which for any individual respondent — it captured a stated preference at one point in time, not where people ended up. That’s a real limit, and worth sitting with before you treat “cohabitation over marriage” as a fixed generational shift.

The Binary Self-Help Sells Doesn’t Match Either Study

Relationship self-help mostly writes to one of two readers. Reader one is actively looking and needs a strategy — books in Secure’s territory, working through attachment patterns so the next relationship goes better than the last one, implicitly aimed at a marriage-shaped outcome. Reader two has stopped looking, or wants to, and needs permission to be fine with that. Both readers exist. Neither reader represents even close to a majority of this sample.

What’s missing from the shelf is a book written for the person who wants a partner in their life, permanently, without a wedding attached — cohabitation as the actual goal, not the placeholder. And there’s close to no self-help written for the third of this sample who aren’t clearly pursuing any partnership and aren’t necessarily unhappy about it, either. That’s not the same population as the “happily single” contentment books target, which tend to assume the reader used to want partnership and is working through not having it. A quarter of this sample says they don’t want it. That’s a different starting point, and it changes what actually useful advice looks like.

This is the same pattern this site keeps finding elsewhere: a genre optimized for a narrower slice of readers than it claims to serve. 122 experts recently reached consensus that well-being itself spans 19 separate dimensions, and most books stake a claim on one or two of them while implying they’ve covered the whole picture. Relationship goals look like they work the same way — not one dominant preference dressed up as universal, but several real preferences, unevenly served.

What This Doesn’t Mean

A few things this research doesn’t establish:

• It doesn’t mean marriage is declining in relevance. Marriage still ranked second, not last, and the Pew data shows most people who cohabit marry eventually. This is about diversity of stated goals, not marriage disappearing.
• It doesn’t mean the “third who want neither” are all content. Uncertain and “no desire” are different categories, and the survey doesn’t tell you whether the no-desire group arrived there happily or by exhaustion. Self-help products broadly don’t move life satisfaction over time, so don’t assume a stated preference and a felt sense of peace are the same thing.
• It doesn’t generalize past this age band or this country. These are U.S. adults ages 30-50 specifically. Goals in your twenties, or in a different country’s marriage culture, could look completely different.
• It doesn’t prove cohabitation and marriage are separate tracks for any given person. As the Pew data shows, they’re frequently the same track at different stages.
• It doesn’t mean prior marriage or cohabitation history determines the answer for everyone. The life-course framework found real associations between past experience and future desire, but plenty of individual variation sat underneath the pattern.

What Actually Holds Up, Given This

• If a relationship book assumes a marriage-track reader by default, ask whether that’s actually you. This data says roughly one in four single adults in early midlife wants neither cohabitation nor marriage, and that’s a normal, common answer, not a deficient one.
• If cohabitation is your actual goal, not your fallback, look for that framed as an end point. Most of the genre still treats living together as a rehearsal for a wedding. For plenty of people surveyed here, it’s the whole plan.
• Match the book to which third you’re in, not to your age. Someone ready to marry, someone who wants a partner without a ceremony, and someone who doesn’t want partnership at all are three different readers with three different useful books — assuming any exist for the third one.
• Be skeptical of any framework that treats “still single at 40” as inherently unresolved. For a meaningful share of this sample, it’s not a waiting room. It’s where they want to be.

The Bottom Line

Sociologists surveyed 799 single adults ages 30 to 50 and found what relationship self-help mostly ignores: there’s no dominant preference. Cohabitation beat marriage as a stated goal. Roughly a third weren’t clearly pursuing partnership of any kind. And a companion Pew analysis shows the cohabitation-versus-marriage split isn’t even as clean as it looks, since most people who live with a partner marry them eventually. The genre keeps writing to one archetype of “single” — trying to get partnered, or trying to feel okay not being. This research says at least four different archetypes exist in that same age range, and most of the shelf is only stocked for two of them.

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Brown, S. L., Manning, W. D., & Guzzo, K. B., “The Future Family Desires of Single Early Midlife Adults,” Family Transitions, 2026. Additional coverage from PsyPost, Pew Research Center, and The Washington Post. Related reading: Secure Review: Can You Change Attachment Style?, 122 Experts Just Agreed on What ‘Well-Being’ Means, and Self-Help Products Don’t Change Your Personality: Study.