Since the percentage of single adults is steadily increasing, the reasons for this development have become a matter of growing interest. Hereby, an individual’s attachment style may have a connection to the partnership status. In the following analysis, attachment style, gender, age, education, and income were compared in regard to the partnership status. Furthermore, an analysis of variance was computed to compare the attachment style within different groups. In 2012, a sample of 1,676 representative participants was used. The participants were aged 18 to 60 (M = 41.0, SD = 12.3); 54% of the sample were female, and 40% were single. Attachment-related attitudes were assessed with the German version of the adult attachment scale (AAS). Single adult males did not show a more anxious attachment style than single adult females or females in relationships. Younger, i.e., 18 to 30 years old, paired individuals showed greater attachment anxiety than single individuals, whereby single individuals between the ages of 31 to 45 showed greater attachment anxiety than individuals in relationships. In addition, single individuals more frequently had obtained their high school diploma in contrast to individuals in relationships. Concerning attachment style, the individuals who had not completed their high school diploma showed less faith in others independent of singlehood or being in a relationship. Concerning age, older single individuals, i.e., 46 to 60 years, felt less comfortable in respect to closeness and showed less faith in others compared to paired individuals. Logistic regression showed that individuals were not single if they did not mind depending on others, showed high attachment anxiety, were older, and had lower education. An income below € 2000/month was linked to a nearly 13-fold increase of likelihood of being single. In sum, the attachment style had a differential age-dependent association to singlehood versus being in a relationship. Education played also a role, exclusively concerning faith in others.

The literature on marriage status and mortality have shown that the married individuals enjoy longer lives than their non-married counterparts. The few studies that included cohabitation have found cohabitants to have a longevity between the married and other non-married groups. There are indications that the cohabiting population is diverse in terms of mortality risk, however, very little is known about how the association is related to age and stages of the life course. This is the first study on mortality and cohabitation for the Swedish population, which is a highly relevant context since Sweden is one of the countries where cohabitation is the most widespread and it has been a forerunner in many family trends. Using Swedish register data this study investigates how different partnership statuses are related to mortality across stages of the life course. It uses cox proportional hazards regression for the years 2012 – 2018 for the adult Swedish born population. Cohabiters were found to have consistently lower mortality risk than all other partnership statuses but the married except premarital cohabiters aged 30-49 who showed no excess mortality compared to the married. Further, the study reproduced findings that the difference between the cohabiters and the married is larger for women compared to men. These results contribute to our understanding of who cohabits at different stages of life, and it underlines that future research must consider cohabiters not as a homogenous group but as a status with diverse meaning that changes across the life course.