When Christel Kleitsch and Avrum Jacobson moved in together, they decided they never wanted to get married. They were children of the '60s, after all, from an era when free love ruled the land. Nearly 30 years later, they're both well-established Toronto writers with two grown children, and they're still not married. In the eyes of the law and among their friends, they are a couple, they say, so where's the need for a piece of paper to prove it? "There is certainly no stigma in it," Kleitsch says of their common-law arrangement. In fact, the only time she ever uses the word "husband," Kleitsch says, is for convenience, "like when the furnace repairman shows up."

South of the border, they would be aghast. While in Canada long-term common-law partnerships abound, marriage still rules in the States. Americans have almost twice as many marriages per 1,000 unmarried women each year as Canada does, and far fewer couples living in sin. In Canada, an amazing 18.4 per cent of all couples are now "cohabiters," whereas in the U.S., the figure is 7.6 per cent. Even when we do marry, we put it off for as long as we can. Here, the average age of first marriage is 28.5 for women and 30.6 for men. In the U.S., the ages are much younger, 25.1 and 26.7 respectively. So why are we so reluctant to get that little piece of paper? There are three reasons: we're less traditional, less religious, and we have Quebec.

Quebec, it turns out, leads not just Canada but the world in common-law couplings. There, a whopping 35 per cent of couples cohabit rather than marry. Family experts say that after the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s when the Church lost much of its influence in the province, religion — and marriage — simply ceased to matter. Montrealer Benoît Laplante, the director of demography programs at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, says Quebecers don't marry because "there is no practical reason to do it. When people decided to leave religion out, they began to disregard it in anything they did."

In the U.S., religion is still a powerful force, and marriage remains at the centre of life, especially in the southern and so-called red states. David Popenoe, a co-director of the National Marriage Project, a non-sectarian research group at Rutgers University in New Jersey, offers a historical perspective. In America before 1970, he recently wrote, cohabitation was not only uncommon, it was "a deviant and unlawful practice found only among people at the margins of society." He adds that "in the 1950s and '60s, if you showed up at a motel and you wanted a room and you had two different last names, they wouldn't give you one." More telling, he says, "It's still that way in the more religious areas of the country."

Popenoe cites a 2007 survey from the Culture and Media Institute in Virginia, which found that nearly 33 per cent of the U.S. population is religiously orthodox. Within this segment, nearly 70 per cent condemns sex between unmarried adults. The survey also found that nearly half of Americans — a group it called "independents" — don't fully accept all orthodox values, but still tend to side with that group on matters of sexual morality.

Ironically, it's not just marriage rates that are higher in the U.S.; divorce rates are too. They're especially high in the Bible belt, says Stephanie Koontz, author and family studies teacher at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. Koontz explains that better-educated people in the more liberal states tend to marry later and stay together longer. In those areas, she says, "marriage is no longer what you do in order to have sex; it's what you do to make a statement about your relationship." Koontz adds that Americans may try living together at some point, but not for any longer than five years. "In Quebec," she says, "you have really long-term cohabitations that act as a substitute for marriage."

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