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What is the difference between cohabitation and marriage? To answer this question, I exploit a pension reform in Sweden that penalised late marriages for cohabiting couples and provides empirical evidence that the couples who are incentivised by the reform are mostly long- term cohabiters —– those who, in the absence of the reform, likely would not have married. In contrast, newer cohabiters were more reluctant to marry quickly, and those who did would have likely married regardless of the reform. These patterns reveal that cohabitation and marriage function both as complements and substitutes. In the early stages of a relationship, cohabitation complements marriage by allowing couples to gather information about their compatibility before getting married. For long-term cohabiters, however, cohabitation increasingly serves as a substitute, providing many of the same benefits without the formal commitment. By linking the benefits couples expect to receive with the loss of information they could tolerate due to the time pressure to marry quickly, I develop a structural model that allow couples to learn about match quality over their relationship and make intra-household decisions on their marital status. I use the model to assess the value of information, and to understand the implication of the de facto marriage laws in the counterfactual experiment.