Why Marry?
Living together without marriage has become fully acceptable in many places, but does it result in greater happiness than does marriage? “Awake!” correspondent in Sweden considers this matter in the following three articles.
JAN and Anna met at a club. They liked each other immediately. Anna had recently left her parents’ home to live by herself. Jan shared his accommodations with another young man. One night, shortly after they met, Jan accompanied Anna to her apartment. He ended up staying overnight. The next day he brought his guitar and toothbrush and stayed overnight again. Gradually he moved all his belongings to Anna’s apartment, and they began living together. Jan and Anna did not find it necessary to marry.
Like Jan and Anna, millions of couples of all ages live together without getting married. They reason: Why marry? We can live together better without a legally binding piece of paper—a marriage license.
In fact, in many places living together without marriage has become fully acceptable and normal. In Sweden, for instance, the number of marriages has decreased by almost 40 percent in the last two decades. Twenty years ago, approximately one child in eight in that country was born to an unmarried mother. Now the figure is between one in three and one in two. Notes researcher J. Trost of Uppsala University, Sweden: “As far as we know this is the highest rate of children born out of wedlock ever known of in an industrialized society.”
In Denmark, living together without marriage represents the standard household unit for young college-educated couples, according to the International Herald Tribune. Such unmarried couples account for more than one out of every three births there. “Hardly anyone we know is married,” said one 31-year-old Danish man. “Everyone has entered what we call a paperless marriage.”
Such paperless marriages are also on the rise in other countries. For example, according to recent figures released by the United States Census Bureau, some two million unwed couples in the United States are living together, more than three times the number in 1970.
Why do a man and a woman so often choose to live together without getting married? Is a paperless marriage as good as or even better than a legal marriage?