Cohabitation also increases self-esteem compared to marriage (again, both direct marriage and marriage preceded by cohabitation).
In Western Europe, and even more in Northern Europe, direct marriage is a minority experience.
As premarital cohabitation became more common, the differences between premarital and direct marriage decreased.
But when nearly everyone practiced premarital cohabitation and direct marriage became rare, the differentials widened again.
Nevertheless, these features show that in Italy, direct marriage is still the most common way of starting the first union.
These traditional values are reflected in relatively stable trends in direct marriage and only a limited uptake of cohabitation (Katus et al. 2007).
The aim of this article is to study the relationship between premarital cohabitation (vs. a direct marriage), civil marriage (vs. a religious marriage), and the stability of the subsequent marriage.
In the Netherlands, men's employment had a stronger effect on direct marriage than on cohabitation but there was no effect of employment on marriage after cohabitation (Kalmijn and Luijkx 2005; cf. Liefbroer 2005).
The authors argued that as premarital cohabitation became the norm, direct marriage became selective of couples who had more conservative or traditional family values, perhaps because their religion held taboos against living together without being married.
In order to investigate our main research questions, we used a multiprocess model composed of simultaneous equations allowing unobserved factors to be correlated across three decisions, i.e., whether to cohabit prior to marriage versus a direct marriage, whether to marry through a civil versus a religious ceremony, and whether and when to experience a legal separation.
