‘I Do’ Becomes ‘I Might’ as Marriage Views Shift in Seoul
June 17, 2014 Leave a comment
Jun 12, 2014
‘I Do’ Becomes ‘I Might’ as Marriage Views Shift in Seoul
Traditional views on marriage are changing in Seoul, with more people saying tying the knot is optional and divorce is OK. While fewer people take vows each year, the number of women marrying younger men is on the rise.
Seoul City Hall released this week a set of data from recent years that suggest that citizens are showing an increasingly lax attitude toward matrimony.
National Statistics Bureau data show that the number of marriage licenses issued in 2013 fell to the lowest in nearly a quarter-century.
In a separate survey from 2012, 62.4% of respondents said that marriage is still a necessity, down from 68% in 2008, but more than one-third said that marriage is just “an option,” up from 28.2% in 2008.
Fewer than seven out of 1,000 Seoulites got hitched last year, one of the lowest annual marriage rates on record. That remains higher than most of the developed world: In 2009, the latest available year from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the number of marriages per 1,000 people across the club of the world’s most developed economies was five.
Attitudes toward divorce also appear to be changing. In the same survey, 44.8% of respondents said they opposed divorce, down from 57.3% four years earlier.
Older people in particular are increasingly open to the option of divorce, with a marked rise in divorces for men and women over 50, according to Statistics Korea data. Meanwhile, the divorce rate has fallen for those under 50 in the decade ending last year.
The overall divorce rate, which peaked at 3.2 out of 1,000 in 2003, has fallen to 2 out of 1,000 since 2011. The number of splits spiked after 1997, the year of the Asian financial crisis.
Nearly 85% of Seoul’s 68,819 newlyweds last year were first-timers and older than in earlier years. The average age for a male Seoulite’s first marriage was 32.6 last year, up from 28.5 years old two decades ago. For women, the average age last year reached 30.4, up from 25.7 in 1993. The number of those women marrying men of the same age or younger has leaped to 31.3% in 2013, up from just 18.7% two decades before, in a sign of a departure from tradition.
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