The length of premarital cohabitation is taken into account while calculating the divorce allowance. A decision of the Court of Cassation established this. The decision applies to situations in which "the marriage is linked to a cohabitation" of the couple that had "the connotations of stability and continuity," and in which the cohabitants "have developed a project and a model of life in common, analogous to that which generally characterizes the family founded on marriage, from which reciprocal economic contributions inevitably also derive." Premarital cohabitation, according to the judges of the Court of Ca "is now a phenomenon of custom that is increasingly rooted in the behavior of our society, which is accompanied by an increased recognition, in statistical data and in people's perception, of de facto ties understood as family and social formations of equal dignity with respect to patrimonial ones." As a result, "for the purposes of attribution and quantification of the divorce allowance, having also a equalization-compensatory nature, in addition to welfare, in the specific cases where the marriage is linked to a premarital cohabitation of the couple, having the connotations of stability and continuity, due to a project of common life, from which reciprocal economic contributions also derive, where a relationship of continuity emerges between the 'de facto' phase of the same union and the 'legal' phase of the marriage bond, the period of premarital cohabitation must also be counted," reads the ruling. "For the purposes of verifying the applicant's contribution to family management and the formation of each spouse's common and personal assets, it is necessary to examine the existence, during premarital cohabitation, of choices shared by the couple that have shaped life within the marriage and to which they can be linked, with verification of the relative causal link, sacrifices or renunciation in particular, of the working/professional life of the economically weaker spouse, who has been unable to guarantee adequate maintenance, after the divorce".
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