Back when I was young, "single" simply meant, for the most part, that a person was not married. Certainly people did live together outside of marriage--we called it "living in sin" of course--but it was not prevalent enough to warrant saying that those doing so were no longer single. If one wanted to say that someone was not even dating anyone, one said one was "unattached". "Dating" meant exactly that, "going steady" was the next step, and so on.
Now, with far greater prevalence of living together (and don't you dare call it "living in sin", or marriage as "making it legal" anymore?), "single" seems to mean "not involved in a relatively permanent or sexual relationship", and the current word for what used to be known as "single" is now "unmarried."
It's an interesting comment on sexual mores today, and it brings to mind the question of how we reach out to the apparently strong majority of young people who see living together as morally acceptable. The historic ways of doing so are to point to STDs (hard to get them if you're with your first partner for life), the pain of broken relationships and risk of domestic violence, and the likelihood of having children without the protective elements provided by law.
But perhaps what's really going on is that most young people haven't had the protection of married parents throughout their growing up, and as they leave high school, they're told that (a) jobs available to most high school graduates won't pay the bills for a home and (b) getting to that point requires one to get a bachelor's or even master's/doctoral degree. So what we've got, really, is a perfect storm where opportunities to live well while unmarried and unattached are rare, and at the same time, larger proportions of young people are in college until their late twenties.
Since sex drive doesn't take a break because one is in college, the result is obvious. We're set up for family disarray.
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