Cohabiting, Married, or Single: Portraying, Analyzing and Modeling New Living Arrangements in the Changing Societies of Europe

Demographers have been slow to reassess the value of the traditional concept of marital status. Until the beginning of the 1960s, a person's living arrangement could be predicted reasonably well by looking at the individual's legal marital status. During the 1980s, the situation altered dramatically. We know that unmarried couples have always existed; however, in the past they were so rare that little importance was attached to this living arrangement. It was also difficult to study the phenomenon because cohabitation was not yet a generally accepted lifestyle. That is no longer the case. Today, in many European countries many couples live together before marriage, and a significant portion of the adult population chooses cohabitation instead of marriage. It is therefore no longer possible not to consider consensual unions when studying marital-status or living arrangement structures.
The book provides an authoritative and up-to-date review and interpretation of the development of the cohabitation phenomenon across Europe.