This paper aims to analyse the impact of demographic and social factors on first partnership in Lithuania – the duration of premarital cohabitation, the sustainability of such relationships, and the transition into marriage. The research is based on the 2019 Family and Inequality Survey of 1970–1984 birth cohorts. Data analysis shows that most young people began their first partnership as a cohabitation rather than marriage, and the average premarital time spent in a cohabitation increases within this cohort. Cohabitation eventually transitions into marriage, and five years after the start of cohabitation, almost all cohabitants marry, and only a small percentage of cohabitating unions dissolve. Based on Cox regression analysis, the level of education and finished studies, as well as pregnancy, are significant predictors of the transition from cohabitation to marriage. The results of the research show that three decades after the beginning of the spread of cohabitation in Lithuania, cohabitation competes with marriage, but it does not challenge the importance of marriage as an institution of childbearing and upbringing.

This paper aims to analyse the family life course trajectories of 1970–1984 birth cohorts in Lihuania. It applies the sequence analysis methods and is based on the Families and Inequalities Survey Dataset collected in 2019. The method provides the opportunities to examine the family life course in a holistic way and has not been used in family demography research in Lithuania so far. The results prove that cohabitation became a normative event in the family formation process, the duration of cohabitation increases, however marriage remains the dominant family arrangement for childrearing. Clasterization of sequences revealed four models of family life trajectories, that reflect the diversity and de-standartization of the family life course.

The paper analyzes family and household types in the mid. 19th century Vilnius and Kaunas gubernijy. The research is based on the large-scale dataset composed of the archival census-like listings of individuals by family units and defined as inventories. The dataset covers the inventories from 1847 and it includes around 20 thousand individuals. Based on the Hammel and Laslett (1974) methodology the research identifies nuclear, extended, and multiple-family households. The research is guided by Hajnal’s (1982) theory on the North-Western and Eastern European household systems. The former could be characterized by the dominance of the nuclear family households. Empirical analysis proves that around 40 percent of all households were nuclear family households. On the other hand, multiple-family households were not dominant. Thus, the main findings corroborate the idea that there was a transitional zone between the Eastern and North-Western household systems in the western part of the tsarist Russian empire.

Living together in one household without being married in modern society is one of the defining features characterizing the transformations of the modern family, mentioned alongside late-age marriage, late-age childbearing, or frequent divorces. Marriage is still a major life transformation, but the pressure to marry today is lighter than ever before and many young couples in Europe start family life from living together in one household and not being married. However, cohabitation has not a universal meaning and role in family formation process and couples cohabit for different reasons and motives. Existing research proves, that union formation pattern depends on socioeconomical and sociodemographic characteristics, it varies by country and changes by time. In the research literature, cohabitation diffusion process is mainly based on the two arguments: cultural value changes which leads to “less marriage” and economic restrains which leads to postponed marriage until economic stability. The aim of this article is to investigate the intentions of cohabitors to marry and the factors modelling these intentions in Lithuania. The empirical analysis is based on the current Family and Inequality Survey (2019) data set about 1970-1984 birth cohort who lived in an extramarital partnership at the time of the research. The data consists rich information on the partnership and fertility, but also social and economic standing. Analysis of the data shows that, most of the cohabiting individuals in the analyzed cohort in Lithuania still undecided about marriage and could not name their intentions in the future. Descriptive statistics suggests that more man than women plan to marry their partner in the future. In addition, cohabitors with the lowest education level do not intend to marry their partner more than any another education level group. The multinomial regression results suggest that factors predicting marriage in the future are sex, partnership satisfaction and education. That leads to assume that in Lithuania cohabitation is only a prelude to marriage and individuals satisfied with the quality of their relationship intends to marry rather than continuing cohabitation as an alternative to marriage. Cohabitation can be chosen as a prelude to marriage to check the strength of a relationship and to accumulate economic and social resources. On another hand, having one child has a negative effect on the marriage intentions among cohabitors.