“…For example, Thornton's research identifies a clear trajectory of changing attitudes towards cohabitation in the US, with rapid changes in the 1960s and 1970s, slowing down in the 1980s. Normative differences in attitudes towards cohabitation have been studied in a variety of comparative settings, particularly in the US (Carter, 1993;Oropesa, 1996;Thornton, 1989;Sweet and Bumpass, 1992;Thornton and Young-DeMarco, 2001;Nock, 1998;Heuveline and Timberlake, 2004;Axinn and Thornton, 2000;Thornton, 1995), and elsewhere such as Sweden (Bernhardt, 2004;Trost, 1978), Europe (Kiernan 2004), the UK (Haskey, 2001;Barlow et al, 2001), and Poland (Kwak, 1996;Mynarska and Bernardi, 2007). An increase in the acceptability of cohabitation can reasonably be interpreted as evidence for weakening of the social norms surrounding marriage, referred to variously as the deinstitutionalisation of marriage (Cherlin, 1994), démariage (Théry, 1993) and the disestablishment of marriage (Coontz, 2004, quoting Cott).…”