Cohabitation without marriage and divorces increase

“The share of married couples has decreased from 54% in 2001 to 40% in 2011. Meanwhile, cohabitation, or people living together without marriage, has increased,” Associate Professor Antoaneta Hristova, Director of the Institute of Population and Human Studies, announced on Tuesday. She added that the share of unmarried people has risen from 33% in 2011 to 40% this year.

According to data for the last 10 years, the share of people living in marital cohabitation but not formally married has increased from 4% to nearly 8%.

Young people increasingly prefer cohabitation without marriage. “Some 70% of all the people living together without marriage are in the younger age group of between 16 and 39 years of age,” specified Hristova. This share decreases with the increase in age and is 16% among people aged 40 to 49 and 14% among those over 50. After 35 years of age, the share of unmarried people living together goes down to around 16% of all singles.

Births in marital cohabitation accounted for 54.1% of all child births in 2010.

Instability in marriage has increased and the number of divorces has risen from 3.7% in 2001 to 5.8% in 2011. The share of divorces is the highest in the mid-age groups and is over 50% in the age group of between 40 and 59.

All these changes will have an impact not only on other demographic processes such as fertility and migration, but also on a number of aspects of the organisation of society. These are related to a part of the social policy and the ways of influencing family and marital behaviour of different groups in society.

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