Divorce declining, but so is marriage

Divorce is on the decline in Costa Rica, but this may be due more to an increase in people living together than to more lasting marriages.

For example, one couple Carlos and Martha, both 30, have been together for more than 10 years and have no plans to get married. 

Couples who once might have wed and then divorced now are not marrying at all,
The CR divorce rate is 17.7 per 1,000 married women, down from 22.6 in 1980. The marriage rate is also on a steady decline: a 50% drop since 1970 from 76.5 per 1,000 unmarried women to 39.9, says the report, whose calculations are based on an internationally used measurement.

"Cohabitation is here to stay," says David Esquivel, a UCR sociology professor, he says. "As society shifts from marriage to cohabitation — which is what's happening — you have an increase in family instability."

Cohabiting couples have twice the breakup rate of married couples, the report's authors say. And in the CR, 40% bring kids into these often-shaky live-in relationships.

"It is important now to think beyond the divorce rate to other kinds of couple unions and look at how stable they are," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, a social historian.

"It's a pretty short period of time for that change (cohabitation) to have occurred and to have taken hold in the way it has," she says.

In the CR 6.1% of coupled households are made up of unmarried, heterosexual partners. Although many European countries have higher cohabitation rates, divorce rates in those countries are lower, and more children grow up with both biological parents, even though the parents may not be married, Esquivel says.

Costa Rica has the morest percentage among Western nations of children who grow up with both biological parents, 83%, the report says.

What do you think about it? This agrees with the above here? You marry or would live in union free?

***Written based on the article published by the Census and Statistics Center of marriages in 2011