OSLO - Bjorn Lindahl and Nina Kjolaas do not feel inclined to declare their love in front of some anonymous official in a municipal building, or in a church. So they have never married - not when they moved in together, not when they bought their first house, not when they had their son, now 16.
"We said that if our child were to be harassed at school, we'd think of doing it," said Mr. Lindahl, 45, who has lived with Ms. Kjolaas for 23 years. "But statistics showed that something like half the kids in Norway had parents who were single or living together."
Not just Norway. In a profound shift that has changed the notion of what constitutes a family in many countries, more and more European children are being born out of wedlock into a new social order in which, it seems, few of the old stigmas apply. The trend is far more pronounced in the Nordic countries, in France and in Britain, and less so in southern countries like Italy and Switzerland, but the figures as a whole are startling, particularly because they tend to hold up across all social classes.
In Norway, for instance, 49 percent of all the births in 1999 were to unwed parents. In Iceland, the figure was 62 percent. In Britain, it was 38 percent, and in France, 41 percent, in 1998, the last year figures were available. Even in Ireland, a deeply Catholic country where divorce became legal a mere seven years ago, about 31 percent of the births in 1999 took place outside of marriage, a figure on par with that in the United States.
Marriage in Europe is by no means obsolete; most Europeans still marry at some point in their lives, and after a precipitous drop in marriage rates throughout the 1990's, some countries have actually experienced incremental increases of late. But with changing attitudes toward religion and toward the role of the individual and the state, the questions of when - and whether - to marry are increasingly seen as deeply personal choices free from the traditional moral judgments of community, family or church.
Even as governments set new policies to cope with the altered arrangements, public figures in a number of countries are serving as examples themselves.
In Britain, where the cabinet is split over whether the government should be in the business of promoting marriage, Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief spokesman, Alastair Campbell, has three children with his companion, Fiona Millar, who happens to be the chief aide to Mr. Blair's wife, Cherie. (Ms. Millar is in Mr. Campbell's "Who's Who" entry, listed as his partner.)
In Norway, Marit Arnstad, an unmarried member of Parliament, became pregnant while she served as the country's oil minister, and is now raising her son on her own. The country's own crown prince, Haakon, lived with his girlfriend, a single mother with a toddler, before marrying her last year.
"The most important thing, it seems to me, is the quality of the relationship between the members of the couple, not whether they are married or not," said Claude Martin, a sociologist who is a professor at the Institute of Political Science in Rennes, France. "Here in France there is very little difference between being married and cohabitating, and very little difference between children born out of wedlock and those that are born within marriage."
The attitude in Europe is substantially different from that in the United States, where the government recently announced that it was actively committed to promoting marriage. The British government has all but abandoned that position, acknowledging in a recent position paper that there were many alternatives to the classic family structure.
At the same time, groups representing single parents - generally far better off economically than their counterparts in the United States - have become a potent political force across Europe.
Welfare policies in many countries are specifically intended to ensure that all children are given the same financial benefits and treated equally in the eyes of the law, whether their parents are married, living together, separated, divorced or single.
"They've taken the marital status out of it and focused on the children," said Kathleen Kiernan, a professor of social policy and demography at the London School of Economics.
Policies enacted in the last two decades by many European governments include legislation ensuring that children born out of wedlock have the same inheritance rights as other children; financial grants to the children of single parents; and the removal, in Britain, of a special tax break for married couples and an increase in cash allowances for families with children.
In Scandinavia, highly complicated living and custodial arrangements between partners, children and former couples, are common.
"We have little commitment to the institution of marriage, that's true, but we do have a commitment to parenthood," said Kari Moxnes, a 57-year-old professor of sociology at the University of Trondheim. "It's not socially acceptable any more in Scandinavia to break the parental relationship."
Most of the cohabiting couples she knows marry for only one reason, she said. "If you have a sabbatical in the United States, you better get married," she said, "because that's the only way your wife or husband is going to go with you for free."
In deeply religious countries like Italy, few children are born to unwed parents - just 9 percent in 1998. But even in Italy, the old rules are breaking down. Most couples live together before marriage, and in a country where children, and fecundity, are adored, it is no longer unusual or embarrassing to see a heavily pregnant bride strolling down the aisle.
The new arrangements have thrown up all sorts of tiny awkwardnesses. "We usually say husband and wife," said Amadeo Conde, a 37-year-old graphic designer in Madrid who has been with his companion, Dawn Broadbridge, for 14 years; their son, Maximilian, is 17 months old. "We don't mind explaining, but it gets rather long to say to the doorman, 'the mother of my child.'"
Ms. Broadbridge, also 37, is an American who has found the relaxed attitudes in Madrid, where most of the couples she knows are unmarried parents, something of an eye-opener. "You would think that in a good Roman Catholic country like Spain, people would get married when they have children," she said. Meanwhile, back home in Sacramento, all her close friends went the traditional route: they married, they had children, and some divorced.
"Most people assumed that we would get married before we had children," Ms. Broadbridge said. "My mom has probably lied to some of her friends - well, not lied, but not told the complete truth."
Eric Larrayadieu, a photographer in France, has not married his girlfriend, Olivia, after more than three years of living together and the birth of Marius, their 6-month-old son.
"Just as it's not possible to make wine without the ground and the grapevines, the two of us are together and we made a very good wine, and it's called Marius," Mr. Larrayadieu said. "Probably the child is the best wedding we could have together."
But the two are now considering marrying, purely for practical reasons - they want to ensure legal and financial protection for the family if one of them dies or falls ill. In France, as in most countries, a surviving live-in partner has no automatic inheritance rights.
Many of the couples decide to split up, of course, and the result has been a significant rise in single parents, most of them mothers.
In the Scandinavian countries, in particular, such women tend to be educated and employed. Buoyed in part by policies that allow them substantial financial grants even when they return to work, single mothers in many European countries are considerably better off than in the United States, where some 45 percent to 50 percent of single mothers live beneath the poverty line.
"As a single mother, you don't have to be ashamed anymore," said Kathrine Lorenz, 35, a child psychologist in Oslo. She is rearing her 3-year-old daughter alone; her former partner, who already had three children by two other women, left her when she became pregnant. (By law, he is obligated to pay 28 percent of his income to the four children.)
Ms. Lorenz was reared by a single mother, too, after her parents divorced when she was 5. Her mother, she said, was ashamed and could not work; Ms. Lorenz was taunted at school. "But our children don't hear this. It's much more normal now."
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