We know that many couples are not married in any European country. But is there some actual data on that?
Estonian statistics looked into families with children and of them, 67% are married and 33% are not. If we also include single parents it’s 18% single parents, 27% not-married and 55% married.
These are nice results, but I am having a hard time putting them into context. So how does your country compare?
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It’s lot easier to find new stats about married/single/divorced people than the ones you mentioned.
Newest I’ve found are from 2011. People with kids : 76% are married, 7.9% are not married and 16.1% are single parents. I assume the not-married number had the biggest growth in the last 10 years.
The Netherlands doesn’t distinguish between marriage and registered partnership. The only reason we have a registered partnership was to finalise my citizenship, we were quite happy being unmarried while raising our kids.
But the number of unmarried couples is increasing, running at about a quarter of total couples:
“On January 1, 2022, there were 1.10 million unmarried couples. Of these, 466 thousand had children. The number of married couples is higher. At the beginning of 2022, there were 3.23 million.” Of the married couples, it’s about 50/50 with kids and without.
[Source: Census Bureau](https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/dashboard-bevolking/woonsituatie/burgerlijke-staat)
Around 2/3 of couples(incl. those without children) are married.
At the same time more than 50% of children are born outside of marriage.
So it’s still very common to get married at some point, it just isn’t the first thing new couples do.
Out of curiosity I checked the local statistics. Of families with at least one child under 18, 56 % are married couples of different sex, then there are 20 % of unmarried couples of different sex, 20 % of single mother families. The remaining 4 % include single father families and same sex couples (both married and unmarried).
So, for couples with or without children, for 2018 : 72% married, 8% “pacsé” (civil union), 20% just living together.
But for the same year, 60% of newborns had unmarried parents.
And civil union has only been available 20 years, the only option before was marriage.
So a huge part of married couples probably comes from older couples, not from people who are currently having kids.
For Portugal, the most recent data I found was from 2011. 730 000 people (8 percent of all people over 15) lived in de facto partnerships back then.