Allman surveys how couples in Haiti form unions and why comparatively few Haitian women are legally married. Historical and present-day pressures behind that pattern are reviewed first, followed by a scheme for sorting Haitian unions into categories that carry cultural meaning rather than imported ones.

The evidence comes mainly from the 1977 Haiti Fertility Survey, together with its pretest. Allman examines what kind of union people are in and how old they were entering their first, along with the background characteristics associated with each.

Union patterns are then treated as something in motion, with figures on how many unions and partners people have and how often plural unions occur, set out for towns and for the countryside. Norms governing sexual behaviour come in for discussion, and the paper closes by weighing what the findings suggest for later research.