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Finland Marriage
Attitudes toward marriage have changed substantially
since
World War II. Most obvious was the declining marriage
rate, which
dropped from 8.5 marriages per 1,000 Finns in 1950 to 5.8,
in
1984, a decline great enough to mean a drop also in
absolute
numbers. In 1950 there were 34,000 marriages, while in
1984 only
28,500 were registered, despite a growth in population of
800,000. An explanation for the decline was that there was
an
unprecedented number of unmarried couples. Since the late
1960s,
the practice of cohabitation had become increasingly
common, so
much so that by the late 1970s most marriages in urban
areas grew
out of what Finns called "open unions." In the 1980s, it
was
estimated that about 8 percent of couples who lived
together,
approximately 200,000 people, did so without benefit of
marriage.
Partners of such unions usually married because of the
arrival of
offspring or the acquisition of property. A result of the
frequency of cohabitation was that marriages were
postponed, and
the average age for marriage, which had been falling,
began to
rise in the 1970s. By 1982 the average marriage age was
24.8
years for women and 26.8 years for men, several years
higher for
both sexes than had been true a decade earlier.
The overwhelming majority of Finns did marry, however.
About
90 percent of the women had been married by the age of
forty, and
spinsterhood was rare. A shortage of women in rural
regions,
however, meant that some farmers were forced into
bachelorhood.
While the number of marriages was declining, divorce
became
more common, increasing 250 percent between 1950 and 1980.
In
1952 there were 3,500 divorces. The 1960s saw a steady
increase
in this rate, which averaged about 5,000 divorces a year.
A high
of 10,191 was reached in 1979; afterwards the divorce rate
stabilized at about 9,500 per year during the first half
of the
1980s.
A number of factors caused the increased frequency of
divorce. One was that an increasingly secularized society
viewed
marriage, more often than before, as an arrangement that
could be
ended if it did not satisfy its partners. Another reason
was that
a gradually expanding welfare system could manage an ever
greater
portion of the family's traditional tasks, and it made
couples
less dependent on the institution of marriage. Government
provisions for parental leave, child allowances, child
care
programs, and much improved health and pension plans meant
that
the family was no longer essential for the care of
children and
aged relatives. A further cause for weakened family and
marital
ties was seen in the unsettling effects of the Great
Migration
and in the economic transformation Finland experienced
during the
1960s and the 1970s. The rupture of established social
patterns
brought uncertainty and an increased potential for
conflict into
personal relationships.
Data as of December 1988
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