Abstract
In this paper, Monika Mynarska and Laura Bernardi are trying to understand why the number of non-marital cohabitation is much lower in Poland than anywhere else in Europe, where it strongly increased for the past thirty years. They report that even though people choosing cohabitation used to suffer a negative societal image, the acceptance of this phenomenon has increased within the Polish society. What is more, the observation can be made that the young Polish are more liberal than their elders. One would say that Inglehart's value-shift theory may be helpful to understand such statistics.
The authors stress a strong correlation between the societal perception of cohabitation and the meanings associated to it. They first describe four stages of cohabitation's societal perception. At the first stage, cohabitation is seen as deviant; at the second, it is considered as a pre-marital stage; at the third stage, cohabitation is seen as an acceptable alternative to marriage, and eventually becomes a marriage equivalent in the fourth stage. According to them, attitudinal changes toward perception are favored by the rise of individualistic values and the de-normalization that it triggers in the society.
