(6) De facto unions are not always the result of a clear and positive choice.  Sometimes persons who are living together in these unions show that they tolerate or bear this situation.  In some countries, the increasing number of de facto unions is due to a disaffection regarding marriage not for ideological reasons, but because of a lack of adequate formation in responsibility, which is the product of the poverty and marginalization of their environment.  A lack of confidence in marriage, however, can also be due to family conditioning, especially in the Third World.  One important factor to be taken into consideration are the situations of injustice and the structures of sin.  The cultural predominance of macho or racist attitudes come together and aggravate this difficult situation very much.

In these cases, it is not unusual to find de facto unions where, from the beginning, in principle, the partners want an authentic life together, consider themselves united as husband and wife, and make efforts to fulfill obligations similar to those of marriage.[5][5]  Poverty, that is often the result of imbalances in the world economic order and structural educational shortcomings, poses serious obstacles that keep them from forming a real family.

In other places, cohabitation (for more or less extended periods of time) is frequent until the conception or birth of the first child.  These customs correspond to ancestral and traditional practices which are very strong in some regions of Africa and Asia and are related to the so-called “marriage by stages”.  These practices are in contrast with human dignity, difficult to uproot, and create a negative moral situation with a characteristic and well-defined social problem. This kind of union should not be identified with the de facto unions we are concerned with here (which are formed on the margin of a traditional kind of cultural anthropology), and pose a challenge for the inculturation of the faith in the Third Millennium of the Christian era.

The complexity and diversity of the problem of de facto unions can be clearly seen if we consider, for instance, that in some cases, their most immediate cause can be related to social security and welfare systems.  This is the case, for example, in the most developed systems where elderly persons form de facto relationships because they fear that marriage would involve tax burdens or the loss of their pensions.