STATE COLLEGE — Dianne Poindexter didn’t hesitate to tell the federal government her relationship status when filling out her census form. Poindexter and the woman she has been with for 17 years each checked off “unmarried partner.”

More Pennsylvanians did, too, in a 2010 head count offering a snapshot of the changing makeup of homes in the commonwealth. Households headed by married couples no longer make up a majority of households in the state, mirroring a national trend.

Conversely, more homes in Pennsylvania are headed by unmarried partners, and the number of households led by same-sex couples is rising.

U.S. Census figures released Thursday found about 33,600 homes headed by same-sex unmarried partners in the commonwealth, up about 58 percent from a decade earlier.

Count the Poindexter home among them.

“I’m sure people are becoming more comfortable” offering the information to the Census Bureau, said Poindexter, a painter from Bethlehem. “I just think overall, there’s more of a tolerance and acceptance in society. ... The numbers have always been there.”

Poindexter shares an opinion similar to that held by some advocacy groups. The statistical increase may not necessarily mean that there more are gay and lesbian couples than a decade ago, more than that more of those couples feel it is OK to identify their relationships on an official government form.

“Same-sex couples have been living together for many years,” said Ted Martin, executive director of Equality Pennsylvania, in Harrisburg. “As people have become more comfortable being out and becoming more comfortable discussing their relationships, this goes with that trend.”

Also, the Census Bureau made a more concerted effort to reach out to gay and lesbian communities in some parts of the country, including Philadelphia, to fill out the questionnaire, said Gary Gates, a demographer at The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, which studies sexual orientation law and gender equality.

Statistics from the once-a-decade count are being released in stages as the Census Bureau studies its reams of data. Figures released last month showed that married couple-headed homes comprised 48 percent of Pennsylvania’s roughly 5 million households in 2010, down from the more than 51 percent of the 4.7 million households a decade earlier.

There were more than 332,000 unmarried partner-headed homes, encompassing both opposite-sex and same-sex couples. That was about 6.6 percent of Pennsylvania households in 2010, up from the more than 237,000 unmarried-partner homes that made up 5 percent of households in 2000.

Gates attributed the trends to a number of factors, including more couples living together before getting married and delaying marriage to a later age. There were also declines in marriage rates among certain race or ethnic groups, he said.

Among latest set of census data released Thursday were more specific breakdowns of those who said they were unmarried partners, offering the first look in 2010 on same-sex couples.

Among counties, Philadelphia, Allegheny and Montgomery had the highest numbers of unmarried partner and same-sex unmarried partner homes.

RJ Thornburg, an interior designer from Philadelphia, doesn’t quite remember what he did with the census form he filled out. He’s not sure if he wants get married to his partner of roughly 10 years, though, he does recall checking off that they are unmarried partners.

“I would perceive there’s an increased acceptance level,” said Thornburg.