Modern Sweden: The declining importance of marriage

Scandinavian Review, Autumn 1998 by Tomasson, Richard F

An acute urban housing shortage affecting both students and the general population in the 1960s and into the 1970s, a result of the galloping economic development of the 1960s, made it easier for nonmarital cohabitation to take hold. However, among the large numbers of young people who followed the radicalized university students and began the new living arrangement in the early 1970s, there were few who were opposed to marriage as such. Most certainly expected to marry, but "later." The long engagements typical of Swedes, combined with weak norms against premarital intercourse, explain how nonmarital cohabitation came to be introduced so quickly into Sweden. This combination, Trost writes, resulted in a sort of "half living together (halvsamboende)." Many couples, for example, lived together during vacations and over weekends.

There are two forces that have sustained and enhanced the decline of marriage and the increase in nonmarital cohabitation in Sweden since the 1960s: secularization and the development of the comprehensive welfare state.

All major western religions have supported traditional marriage. When the authority of religious belief and its functionaries become diminished, traditional marriage loses one of its greatest institutional supports. In Sweden religious belief and practice and the role of organized religion in everyday life have declined to the lowest levels among modern societies. Weekly attendance at religious services has declined to the low single digits. Still, the large majority of the population continues membership in the Church of Sweden, a situation of "belonging but not believing." Most of the declining number of marriages are church weddings, a majority of children continue to be baptized and confirmed, and the great majority are buried by the Church.

The decline of marriage accompanied by the enormous increase in nonmarital births has also occurred along with the development of the extensive Swedish welfare state.

The basic unit of the Swedish welfare state is the individual, not the family. One is taxed as an individual, there is no "joint filing." Child allowances are paid only to one parent, usually the mother. Special solicitousness, economic and otherwise, toward single parent compared with two-parent households is social policy. Basic to the ideology of the governing Social Democrats and of the women's movement is that women should be financially independent of men. These forces may contribute to an equality between the sexes, but they also contribute to the declining importance of marriage.

Richard F. Tomasson is Professor of Sociology at the University of New MexicoAlbuquerque. During 1997-98 he was an ASF Fellow at Stockholm University's Institute of Social Research, where he was writing a book on Swedish society at the end of the 20th century.