Dating is hard. The goalposts seem to be moving constantly: When should you stop seeing other people? When do you move in together? When is it time to call it quits?
Researchers recently released an analysis of how relationships progressed after a couple's first sexual encounter, based on surveys of 2,744 American men and women between the ages of 18 and 39 whose last relationship was with someone of the opposite sex.
Here's the upshot: In the 12 months after the first time having sex with someone, most people either move in or move on.
Only 23% of the respondents were still seeing each other, but not cohabitating. Another 27% had started living together. Everyone else — half the respondents — had broken up.
The average length of a relationship was a little less than five months after the first time the couple had sex.
In fact, roughly a third of couples break up before the six-month mark. This is especially true of respondents under 25, who tend to to exit their relationships more quickly.
People's backgrounds seemed to matter a lot, too. Respondents whose parents had remarried were more likely to move in with their partners more quickly — though, as the study points out, parental remarriage has been linked to leaving home at a younger age. How much education someone's mother had, which is usually an indicator of an economically advantaged background, was tied to delayed cohabitation.
The report excluded those who had been in a relationship for more than a year at the time of the survey, or who had married in that time without living with their partner first. The results also might have been different if the researchers had looked at same-sex relationships, people older than 39, or people in countries other than the US. And it's impossible to know how things progress after the single year the study examined.
While looking at an analysis of a large sample can be interesting, it's hard to apply findings like this to any individual couple. Different people have different feelings about what kinds of relationships are ideal, and not every sexual encounter is expected to lead to something lasting.
Sharon Sassler, a professor at Cornell and a coauthor of the study, offered some general advice, however: Don't rush things.
"I would argue that relationships take time to develop — so try to take your time in a new sexual relationship before discussing the possibility of living together," she told Tech Insider in an email. "Make sure there are enough talks about what the expectations are"— the possibility of kids, for example, or whether marriage is equally important to you and your partner.
And if you're not cohabiting with your partner at six months? If you're happy, don't worry about it. "The relationships that I've observed that are higher quality are often the ones that unfold over time," Sassler said.
"Get to know the other person a bit," she added. "See how good they are at making coffee and cooking you breakfast."
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