With the change of the family also couple’s careers before marriage have changed. When people marry, so we can say with some empirical and theoretical evidence, they are more experienced with living in partnerships. Moreover it is discoverable that the couple’s career with the spouse-to-be is much more individualised and it is following much less traditional patterns than it did a few decades ago. There is, however, little research regarding which experiences with partnerships people have in general and which biographical transitions are characteristic for the couple’s career with the spouse-to-be.

The aim of this article is to analyse the partnership biographies and couple’s career of the marriage cohorts 1999 to 2005 and to identify major factors with data of the Mainz “Value of Marriage” study. The results show that the experience with partnerships in general before marriage has increased and that couple’s careers before marriage show much regularity, despite all tendencies of individualisation.