A band of gold loses its lustre

IT’S NEW Year’s Day, about five in the morning, and I’m at a huge Nicosia warehouse where everyone is dancing. A serious contender on the dance floor is a young woman. Amongst the general craziness, you probably wouldn’t look twice at her, except for this: she’s heavily pregnant.

A month later, the woman, 29-year-old economist Nefeli, and her 31-year-old partner, Phivos, invite their friends over for brunch. The couple, both in jeans and T-shirts, are sharing knowing looks.

After everyone has had their fill of all sorts of wonderful food, the couple then drop the bombshell. “We’re getting married right now. Will you walk with us to the Registrar’s office so we can get on with it?”

“And after we had done that we had a huge impromptu party,” recalls Nefeli, now the mother of a baby boy.

I ask her why they bothered getting married at all if it was such a casual affair.

“Mostly for bureaucratic reasons,” she says, adding that by being married the parents avoided the antiquated hassle of Phivos having to go the family court and swearing in front of court officials that he was the father of the child.

And family pressure?

“Some of our parents made it clear they would rather we got married before having the baby,” she admits.

But all in all, marriage wasn’t that big of a deal either way for Nefeli, and recent figures strongly indicate that she’s in very good company.

In 2009 – the most recent year for which statistics are available – 11.7 per cent or 1,128 births in Cyprus were out of wedlock. This may not sound much compared to England and Wales where latest figures show 46 per cent of babies are born out of wedlock, but attitudes in Cyprus are most certainly changing. In 1980, for example, a mere 0.65 per cent, or around six in every thousand, babies were born to parents who weren’t married.

What the 2009 figures don’t reveal is how far the more than 160,000 registered EU nationals and legal third country immigrants have contributed to this quite remarkable increase in extra-marital births. An official from the Statistical Services Office, which released the latest Demographic Report, explains they didn’t break down the figures into Cypriots and non-Cypriots.

But Christina Loizou, a researcher with the University of Nicosia’s Research Unit on Behaviour and Social Issues, says it’s quite clear there has been a rapid change in Cypriots’ attitudes towards marriage.

“We can draw a parallel with more people moving in together before marriage,” she says, adding that she knows personally 10 Cypriots who have had children out of wedlock. “With divorce rates increasing, getting married before having a family has become less important.”

She added that there is a real need for a specialised study to see what people’s attitudes are and how they’ve changed.

“I personally have told my children I don’t care if they get married or not,” she says.

Jasmine, a half-Cypriot 30-year-old artist in Nicosia, is one of this new 11.7 per cent. She’s just had a baby but has no immediate plans to get married, and her mother has even told Jasmine she won’t attend if her daughter ever decided to get married in a church.

“My parents were hippies and only married in the 70s so my dad could stay in London,” says Jasmine. “I never thought of marriage as something that would define my life with my partner. I even find the word ‘husband’ strange. It doesn’t roll off the tongue.”

Despite her dismissive attitude towards marriage, Jasmine does intend to marry her partner eventually. Her reasons echo Nefeli’s – legalities and parental pressure, in her case from her partner’s parents. And it’s clear that if weren’t for these two factors that 11.7 per cent could well be considerably higher.

“I will marry for legal reasons. It’s pretty serious. If one parent dies, the other has no rights. I would rather not get married but want to be covered, you never know,” says Jasmine.

The pressure from the parents of her partner, Dimitris, she acknowledges but finds harder to deal with.

“They really want us to baptise our son Stefanos. It’s a big invasion in your life, when your family pressurises you. It stops you from doing what you want to do,” she says.

Tellingly, it’s because of the parents that everyone in this article asked that their names be changed.

“If our parents heard us they would freak out,” says Sophia a 32-year-old EAC professional.

“But it’s not that important any more which comes first. If a baby comes along, it’s welcome,” Sophia says.