By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter

Foreign wives on average are more than 10 years younger than their Korean husbands, the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs said Wednesday.

According to its survey of 73,000 "multicultural families," the wives mainly come from China, Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan. About 154,000 multicultural couples are registered.

The majority of the non-Korean wives are in their 20s when they get married to Koreans who are mostly in their 40s.

Cambodian and Vietnamese wives' age gaps with their husbands widen to 17.5 years and 17 years, respectively. About 30 percent of their husbands have been married before.

Foreign husbands are only about 1.3 years older than their wives. They account for 9.6 percent among cross-cultural marriages and they are mainly from China, North America, Japan and West European countries.

Many Korean husbands rely on international marriage brokers or close relatives for arranged marriages but foreign husbands get to know their wives through blind dates.

Many of the interracial families have relatively low income. About 38.4 percent make somewhere between 1 million and 2 million won a month, lower than Korean families' average of 3.4 million won. On the other hand, some non-Korean husbands make more than 5 million won.

About 36 percent of foreign wives have not graduated from high school. Ministry official Lee Seong-mi said many of them have to work to supplement household income. But they are working in low paying, menial jobs due to language barriers and low education backgrounds.

More than half of inter-cultural couples expressed they were satisfied with their marriage.

"Their level of satisfaction is higher than Korean families. We assume that this is attributed to their lower expectations at the start of their marriage. Then they also found that their marriage is better than initially feared," said Kwon Yong-hyun of the ministry.

bjs@koreatimes.co.kr