Summary

In recent years, more and more demands have been voiced in Estonia to legalise nonmarital cohabitation and to approximate the legal regulation of marriage and other forms of cohabitation. There is also talk about the equalisation of marriage and nonmarital cohabitation.
The authors of the article examine whether the legal regulation of marriage may be among the factors forcing people to seek alternatives to marriage. Also, the authors analyse whether the existing legislation and legal mechanisms allow the resolution of matters of dispute typically arising from nonmarital cohabitation or whether there is a need for additional regulation.
The legal treatment of nonmarital cohabitation is compared with that of marriage. The main characteristics of marriage and nonmarital cohabitation are pointed out and the basic types of nonmarital cohabitation are looked at. The article offers a comparison of legal positions arising from nonmarital cohabitation with marriage, first and foremost in the context of proprietary relations between the spouses or cohabitants. The authors argue that there is no reason to claim that nonmarital cohabitation is absolutely unregulated in the Estonian civil law. However, principles of matrimonial property cannot be fully extended to nonmarital cohabitation.