O, v temu!MONTREAL – Quebecers have long led Canada in the modern move away from wedding vows toward common-law coupling, but now the province has roared past Sweden and Finland to lead the world.New data from the 2006 census released Wednesday shows no couples on the planet are known to shack up more than those in la belle province.The dramatic move away from marriage is accelerating wildly in Quebec, with 35 per cent of couples choosing common-law arrangements compared to 30 per cent in 2001, the last time the data was collected by Statistics Canada.Common-law living is increasingly popular across Canada and the industrialized world. But French-speaking Quebec's history of domination by one religion combined with a mass conversion to secularism boosted the phenomenon dramatically in the province, experts say...........................Quebec's anglophone and immigrant minorities are more likely to follow the Canadian pattern, they add.For francophone Quebecers, marriage and Catholicism were inextricably linked. When they rejected religion, marriage went with it, according to sociologist Martin Meunier......................Le Bourdais said many Quebecers are unaware that common-law relationships have hidden pitfalls when it comes to dividing property in the case of a split up, or death. When a partner dies, property is automatically passed on to children rather than the spouse, for example. Common-law spouses also have fewer obligations to share property when they split, she said. "Mostly it's women getting the short end of it," Le Bourdais says. http://www.thestar.com/News/article/255724