>The family unit is a changing concept: what it means to be a member of a family and the expectations people have of family relationships vary with time and space, making it difficult to find a universally agreed and applied definition. Legal alternatives to marriage, like registered partnerships, have become more widespread and national legislation has changed to confer more rights on unmarried and same sex couples. Alongside these new legal forms, other forms of non-marital relationships have appeared, making it more difficult for statisticians to collect data within this domain that can be compared across countries.
Marriage does not matter anyway other than for legal reasons
7 comments
Marriage is overrated and expensive.
If you don’t know a single mother with a black fathered child then you’re not french
Would be interesting if this changes for when the baby was conceived. At least in Germany, many people marry after conception but prior to birth.
France: deeply religious.
Also France:
Marriage doesn’t give you special baby powers
I was wondering if civil unions like PACS were counted or no, but when looking on [Eurostat’s website](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Marriage_and_divorce_statistics#A_rise_in_births_outside_marriage), it looks like it isn’t. This makes the data we see here relatively nonrepresentative of the actual differences between the countries. And that’s more or less what they say in the contextualisation of the study.
>The family unit is a changing concept: what it means to be a member of a family and the expectations people have of family relationships vary with time and space, making it difficult to find a universally agreed and applied definition. Legal alternatives to marriage, like registered partnerships, have become more widespread and national legislation has changed to confer more rights on unmarried and same sex couples. Alongside these new legal forms, other forms of non-marital relationships have appeared, making it more difficult for statisticians to collect data within this domain that can be compared across countries.
Marriage does not matter anyway other than for legal reasons