Under modern conditions, the institute of family and marriage relations is of stable research interest in the context of the transformation processes of society associated with the spread of various forms and models of unregistered marriage, which are popular among modern youth. Due to its institutional features, unregistered marriage has a number of advantages, in which the absence of legal foundations of marriage and mutual obligations between partners play a crucial role in choosing the forms and models of the future family. It was found that the most common form of unregistered marriage relations in the modern youth environment is a "trial marriage", which allows to identify the partners` mutual interest degree in the process of living together in the conditions of interpersonal interaction, revealing the specifics of such marriage unions, which do not always justify the ideas of young people about the essence of family-marriage relations. The analysis of empirical data on the problem under study indicates the presence of contradictory trends in the attitude of young people to the phenomenon of unregistered marriage, characterized by a pronounced individualization of the values of the younger generation, refl ecting the desire of young people to abandon traditional forms of family and popularize alternative forms of marriage.