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That is not true for governmental statistics in general.

Could you be more specific or provide examples of a government census that asks about relationship status beyond legally recognized partnership situations?

I'm only familiar with the US and that data seems to be hard to come by. In the EU the European Social Survey seems to have pretty comprehensive questions although it's not from a government agency.

I just put "unmarries partnership" or couples and "cohabitating partners" into Google and there was tons of it. Census itself seems to answer questions like these.

I followed quite a lot of sociology lately for fun and they play with these a lot too.

Ah, that's reasonable. One issue with with the census questions is that they're mainly focused on defining a "household" and ignore situations like being in a relationship but living separately. But married + cohabitating should give a good first-order approximation of the non-single population overall.

Unfortunately, non-scholarly articles about dating pretty much always use the legal definition of "single", probably because deciding who is single in the dating sense is so tricky.

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