In terms of household types — based on indicators of the level of fertility, divorce, non-marital cohabitation and extramarital fertility — Belgium is in the literature often grouped together with countries such as Austria, Germany, Luxembourg and Switzerland in the Centre Group, whereas France, Norway, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom are grouped in the West Group (Kuijsten, 1995). Sardon
... [Show full abstract] (1992) remarks that over the last decades women in Belgium marry at a much younger age than in the other Western European countries, and that their age at first marriage is very close to those observed in the Eastern European countries. So, although on the Atlantic side of Europe, Belgium does not seem to be very Western from a demographic perspective.