Society in the United States
Marriage, cohabitation and births outside marriage: what official statistics and public debates show.
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How Many Americans Have Sex Before Marriage? What the Data Show
Nearly all. A 2007 study of the National Survey of Family Growth found that by age 44, 95% of Americans had had premarital sex, including 94% of women and 96% of men. Only about 3% of respondents had abstained until marriage. By age 20, 75% had already had premarital sex.
View the topic →Is Sex Outside Marriage Morally Acceptable? American Opinion Over Time
In Gallup's May 2026 poll, 65% of Americans said sex between an unmarried man and woman is morally acceptable and 31% called it wrong. Acceptance rose from 53% in 2001 to a peak of 76% in 2022, then slipped. Religion matters most: Pew found white evangelicals far less accepting than the unaffiliated.
View the topic →Cohabitation in America: More Common Than Marriage for Young Adults
Cohabitation is now a more common experience than marriage among younger adults. Pew reported in 2019 that 59% of Americans aged 18 to 44 had lived with an unmarried partner, while 50% had ever married. People also marry later: the Census Bureau put the median age at first marriage at 30.2 for men and 28.6 for women in 2024.
View the topic →Purity Culture in America: Pledges, Rings and Their Critics
Purity culture is a movement within American evangelicalism that urged young people to pledge sexual abstinence until marriage, often with rings or signed cards. True Love Waits, a Lifeway campaign, began with students in the Nashville area. A 2009 study found pledgers no less likely than matched peers to have premarital sex, but less likely to use contraception.
View the topic →Abstinence-Only Education: Federal Funding and State Rules
Yes. Section 510 of the Social Security Act, 42 U.S.C. § 710, funds "sexual risk avoidance education" at $75 million a year from fiscal 2018 through 2026. Programs must present avoiding nonmarital sexual activity as the optimal health behavior. At state level, 43 states and DC require sex or HIV education to cover or stress abstinence, per Guttmacher's 2025 data.
View the topic →Births Outside Marriage in the US: Numbers and Changing Views
In 2024, 39.5% of US births were to unmarried women, about 1.43 million babies, according to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. Opinion has shifted too, if unevenly: in Gallup's 2026 poll, 58% of Americans called having a baby outside marriage morally acceptable, down from 67% a year earlier.
View the topic →Faith and Sex Outside Marriage: How US Religious Groups Differ
Views vary widely by faith. In Pew's 2019 survey, 79% of religiously unaffiliated adults said sex between unmarried adults in a committed relationship is sometimes or always acceptable, compared with 67% of mainline Protestants, 64% of Catholics, 57% of historically Black Protestants and 46% of evangelicals. Frequent churchgoers were least accepting.
View the topic →Chastity Rules at Religious Colleges: BYU's Honor Code and Beyond
The Church Educational System Honor Code, which governs Brigham Young University, asks students to "live a chaste and virtuous life," defined as abstaining from sexual relations outside a marriage between a man and a woman. It mirrors the Latter-day Saint law of chastity, which the Church describes as having no sexual relations outside a legal marriage.
View the topic →Can Unmarried Couples Share a Hotel Room? North Carolina's Odd Law
Not in practice, but one statute remains. North Carolina General Statute 14-186, dating to 1917, makes it a Class 2 misdemeanor for a man and woman to occupy the same hotel bedroom "for any immoral purpose" or to register falsely as husband and wife. Such laws are considered unenforceable for consenting adults after Lawrence v. Texas.
View the topic →Later Marriage, Longer Singlehood: What It Means for Sex Before Marriage
In 2024 the median age at first marriage in the United States was about 30.2 for men and 28.6 for women, up from 23.1 and 21.1 in 1974, according to the Census Bureau. Since federal survey data show about three in four Americans have had sex by age 20, most spend years as sexually active unmarried adults.
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