Dynamics of marriage development indicators

One of the main objectives of the National Family Project, which will last until 2030, is to strengthen family values. To solve this problem it is important to analyze new trends in the development of the institution of marriage in Russia. The theoretical basis is the statement about the difference between evolutionary and transformational changes in social institutions. The empirical basis is a database of a representative sample of individuals from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey – Higher School of Economics (RLMS-HSE-2023 and information on the number of married people by gender, age and marital status in the period 2011–2023, provided by the Department of Population and Health Statistics of Rosstat. The trend of increasing premarital cohabitation is shown. Only 10.6% of married couples who registered marriage in 1955–1980 lived together for more than three months before marriage, and 67,3% of married couples who registered marriage in 2011–2023. Urban rather than rural spouses cohabited before marriage, regardless of their level of education. It was found that from 2011 to 2023, the proportion of brides and grooms registering marriage for the first time decreased in younger ages. There are more young brides in villages, in republics, the titular peoples of which profess Islam. In remarriage, the proportion of men increased from 26,2% in 2011 to 36,4% in 2023, and the proportion of women increased from 25,4% to 38,2%, which can be explained by the world’s highest divorce rate in Russia and an increase in life expectancy. The differences between urban and rural residents are negligible. The average number of children among women in remarriages is higher than in the first. Remarriages were more than twice as likely to be preceded by cohabitation, among them there are more heterogeneous couples in terms of age and with an average level of education compared to the first marriages. The dynamics of the proportion of couples with different levels of education of spouses is presented. Among couples with minor children, there are twice as many hypogamous couples in terms of education (22,5%) as there are hypergamous couples (9,8%). The proportion of hypogamous couples by age is also increasing. Premarital cohabitation, remarriage, and couples who are hypogamous in terms of educational level can be considered as deviations in the development of the institution of marriage, in the long term as normative practices, hypogamous in terms of age as a variation, it is unlikely that the proportion of such couples will increase significantly. It is promising to study the dynamics of heterogeneity according to the criteria of ethnicity, religious affiliation, migrant/indigenous status. So far, there are not enough representative databases for such an analysis.

marriage, transformation, evolution, premarital cohabitation, hypogamy, age of first marriage, remarriage