Marriage vs. Cohabitation in Europe: Are Attitudes Changing?

The term “calling hours” probably makes people think of a funeral home rather than a time when gentleman callers could find ladies at home for supervised visits (except perhaps among watchers of “Bridgerton”). Calling hours would likely stay outdated even if everything else associated with courting made a full comeback—today’s communication technologies offer many alternatives to waiting at home for a date. So asking whether something, such as marriage, is still outdated is a reasonable question: it may have been replaced like typewriters, it can make a comeback like vinyl records, or it can become common again like blue books for college exams.

Nonetheless, asking whether marriage is still outdated may sound strange—in part because cohabitation has not had the kind of impact on marriage that computers did on typewriters. When Czechian researcher Dominika Perdoch Sladká recently published “Is Marriage Still Outdated? Changing Views on Marriage and Cohabitation in Five European Countries,” her title was not meant to imply that marriage has become uncommon anywhere.

The question is about attitudes rather than practice, and it has been asked in surveys for quite some time. In 1990, the World Values Survey asked: “Marriage is an outdated institution—agree or disagree?” In the Generations and Gender Survey data Sladká used, respondents could answer that question on a five-point scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. 

Previous work indicates that public opinion in 21 countries shifted toward less traditional views regarding marriage and nonmarital relationships between 1988 and 2008, and Sladká built on this by examining change from 2004-2009 to 2020-2023. She found that norms did not become uniformly less traditional over that time. Germans’ evaluation of marriage was unchanged, and she documented a substantial shift toward positive views on marriage in Czechia and Estonia—people, on average, considered it less outdated by the end of the 15-year period. Moreover, pronounced increase in acceptance of cohabitation occurred only in Austria and Germany. By the later survey, Germans were even more accepting of cohabitation than Norwegians.

This presents a substantial challenge to the expectation that family norms will continue to liberalize. The findings, however, are not in sharp contrast to those arising from examination of 1988-2008 attitudinal trends. As Sladká notes, even previous work found more consistent change in public acceptance of behaviors outside marriage than in beliefs about the institution.

When it comes to cohabitation and marriage, the newest thing is not always the most satisfying.

I think this indicates that Europe has formed what is known as a “dual nuptiality regime” in Latin America: this is where marriage and cohabitation are both socially-recognized options for adult unions. Interestingly, despite high levels of cohabitation in Latin America dating back to pre-colonial times, informal unions still differ from marriages in their stability, legal obligations, and safeguard mechanisms. In other words, a dual nuptiality regime implies equal social recognition but not equivalency.

My guess is that Sladká’s new findings reflect the fact that people know that. They can be very accepting of ubiquitous cohabitation without finding marriage outdated.

So why isn’t marriage becoming passe? Is it just that Czechia, Estonia, and Germany are simply experiencing cultural lag, i.e., that change in marriage attitudes is stymied by relatively rigid marriage norms, which will eventually adapt to a new reality? This is unlikely based on the history Sladká provides. For example: 

• Czechia: Following the collapse of the socialist regime in 1989, changes in family behavior were rapid and profound. The abruptness of the liberalization of family patterns together with nonmarital births remaining relatively uncommon by European standards and recent scholarship describing Czechian cohabitation as “weakly institutionalized” might argue for attachment to “Old World Values.”
   
• Estonia shares Czechia’s socialist background, but not its historical family patterns. Fully 80% of women born between 1965 and 1970 who entered unions by age 25 cohabited first. Those women are 55-60 today. They chose the less traditional union option a long time before 1989; changes in family patterns have not been abrupt and increasing support of marriage is less likely to reflect a traditional segment holding stalwart against social change.
   
• Germany is a mixed bag. Cohabitation started to spread in the 1970s, but remains relatively uncommon, and marriage being protected by the constitution impedes legal reform supporting cohabiting couples. In eastern Germany, cohabiting couples are less likely to marry than in Western Germany.

While Czechia and Germany certainly have characteristics that could support a cultural lag argument, Austria shares some of these characteristics and has lower rates of nonmarital childbearing than Estonia. The fact that Austrians increasingly agree that marriage is outdated, despite having a profile that could predict slow attitudinal change, highlights the insufficiency of the cultural lag explanation.

Similarly, Sladká’s data patterns argue against legal support as a sufficient explanation for why people would still value marriage when their society offers them socially-sanctioned alternatives. Like Germany, Austria does not offer much protection for cohabiting couples, but more Austrians have deemed marriage outdated over time anyway.

Which brings us back to dual nuptiality regimes being characterized by equal social recognition but not equivalency. Across social contexts, people recognize differences between cohabitation and marriage. In this way, marriage is more like vinyl records than exam blue books, which represent a pragmatic adaptation to the challenge of assessing learning in the era of AI. While there are historical, economic, and nostalgic reasons that vinyl record sales have risen, there’s also digital burnout and superior sound quality. Like cohabitation and marriage, the newest thing is not always the most satisfying.

Laurie DeRose is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and Director of Research for the World Family Map Project.

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