Property Relations Between Unmarried Cohabitants in International Family Law

This article is about the legal regulation of property relations between unmarried cohabitants in national legislation and the attempts to govern the said issues on the international level. The paper classifies states into groups based on their legal approach to unmarried cohabitation with examples from domestic legislation and court practice. The paper highlights the problem of absence of international conventions and national conflict of law rules on the matter and offers solutions to these issues.

Unmarried cohabitation and its fertility in Ireland: Towards post-Catholic family dynamics?

Ireland was known for being conservative in family matters. The 2015 referendum that allowed same-sex marriage and the 2018 one that allowed abortion showed this is no longer true. This article aims at better understanding recent family change in Ireland by looking at changes in values on topics related with family behaviour and change in behaviour related with family formation–the rise of unmarried cohabitation, and childbearing within unmarried cohabitation–with a focus on the Catholic dogma and its role in the Irish society. We use data from the 2008 European Value Survey and from the five censuses conducted between 1991 and 2011. We find that the young have been moving away from the teachings of the Church on unmarried cohabitation, but that a few years before the 2018 referendum, they were still close to it on abortion. There is no clear negative relationship between cohabitation or fertility within cohabitation and education, but the use of cohabitation seems to vary according to education. The most enduring legacy of the Church doctrine seems to be the late development of family policies that make motherhood hard to reconcile with work and might explain why cohabiting women have few children.

De Onzichtbare Scheidingsgolf : Een analyse van relatieontbinding van samenwonenden en gehuwden in België

: This article studies relationship break‐up among married and cohabiting couples, based on the Belgian data ofthe Crossroads Bank of Social Security. The results are based on a sample of couples marrying for the first timeor starting to cohabit for the first time between 1999 and 2001. The sample is followed over time until 2013. Thepurpose of this study is to gain insight in relationship break‐up of married and cohabiting couples using registerdata. Given the fact that cohabiting couples are underestimated in official statistics because these only use offi‐cially registered partnerships (e.g. legal cohabitation), cohabiting couples are identified in this article on the basisof their LIPRO typology giving a more correct insight in relationship dynamics of cohabiting couples.The article looks at patterns of relationship dissolution with the aid of survival analysis and a discrete time eventhistory analysis for three relationship trajectories: marriages formed without premarital cohabitation, marriagesformed after a period of premarital cohabitation and cohabitations not (yet) converted into a marriage duringthe observation period. The results show that cohabiting couples not marrying during the observation period,have a much lower chance to be together after 14 years compared to the married couples. The differences be‐tween married couples with and without a period of unmarried cohabitation are more limited. Further, we findthat a break‐ups are more common among couples who start living together at an early age, start from a weakereconomic background or those that do not have children during the first four years. The association betweenrelationship break‐up and these background characteristics is similar among all three relationship trajectoriesstudied.

Naive realism in the unmarried cohabitation controversy in the United States

We explored the role of “naïve realism” in perceptions of attitudinal differences between proponents and opponents of unmarried cohabitation (UC) in the United States. Participants were presented with UC vignettes, asked to describe their own impressions of the couple in each scenario, and then to speculate about the impressions of the typical UC proponent and opponent. A comparison of these impressions yielded a pattern of false polarization in their perceptions, such that partisans’ self-reported sympathy was reliably more similar than the degree of sympathy either side attributed to the other. Partisans also exhibited egocentric bias regarding the basis for each side’s stances on UC. The relevance of this misperception and faulty assumptions toward the resolution of the debate over unmarried cohabitation is discussed.

DETERMINANTS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF UNMARRIED COHABITATION AND ITS IMPACTS ON MARRIAGE: WESTERN EXPERIENCES

Hidup bersama tanpa nikah merupakan fenomena yang tidak asing di Barat. Ada beberapa aspek menarik yang dapat dipelajari dari fenomena itu. Hasil-hasil penelitian menunjukkan latar belakang, karakteristikdan pola hubungan sosial yang spesifik pada individu yang memilih hidup bersama tanpa nikah. Hal lain yang menarik dari fenomena itu adalah efeknya terhadap perkawinan. Anggapan bahwa melakukan kumpul kebo sebelum nikah akan menurunkan risiko terjadinya perceraian, ternyata tidak terbukti. Tidak terbuktinya hipotesis bahwa kumpul kebo merupakan persiapan pernikahan memunculkan anggapan bahwa pola hubungan itu sebagai alternatif pernikahan atau upaya untuk tidak terikat. Ketiga anggapan itupun belum jelas terbukti dalam tulisan ini. Sementara itu ada anggapan yang kuat bahwa hakekat pernikahan tidak berubah dengan makin banyaknya pasangan yang memilih hidup tanpa nikah