Living Far Apart Together: Dual-Career Location Constraints and Marital Noncohabitation

For dual-career couples, "two-body" or "co-location" problems may put their relationships and careers in conflict. This paper uses data from the 2000 United States census to estimate the probability of non-cohabitation among married, college-educated workers and to examine the association between non-cohabitation and three proxies for career-related location constraint: education beyond college, the geographic mobility of workers in a person's occupation, and the geographic clustering of workers in the occupation. I find that non-cohabitation is unusual but not unknown among highly educated workers; the prevalence of non-cohabitation among all college-educated workers was 1.9 percent, and the prevalence was as high as 2.8 percent for women and 4.2 percent for men under 30. Consistent with the idea that some couples live apart to solve a dual-career location problem, I also find that non-cohabitation is more common among workers with higher levels of education and workers in occupations with high degrees of geographic clustering. Contrary to my expectations, however, I find that non-cohabitation is less prevalent among workers in occupations with high rates of geographic mobility.