By Kim Tong-hyung
The number of middle-aged Koreans living without a spouse has jumped over the past five years to a record level, official figures showed Monday, as higher divorce rates continue to change the country’s family structure.
According to Statistics Korea, the number of households headed by adults who were divorced or widowed was tallied at 3.3 million at the start of November last year.
Divorces affected 1.26 million of these families to account for about 7 percent of all Korean households at the time of the survey. This represented a 40 percent increase from 904,000 households measured in 2005 and more than double the 553,000 recorded in 2005.
More than 80 percent of the divorced households were headed by people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, showing a substantial increase in singletons approaching retirement.
The country’s divorce totals have been soaring over the past three decades, illustrating fundamental changes in the patterns of family life. The number of divorces granted in 1980 was 24,000, but the figure increased to 54,000 in 1992, 116,000 in 1998 and peaked at 167,000 in 2003. Since then, annual divorce numbers have settled around the 120,000 mark.
The number of adults living alone, either after divorce or the death of their spouses, was measured at 1.76 million or more than 10 percent of all Korean households.
About 57 percent of the divorced households were headed by women, with 43 percent headed by men. This also partially explains why the single-spouse households are, as conventional wisdom goes, less affluent than two-spouse households, and associated with the income gap and availability of economic opportunities that are also in men’s favor.
Nearly half of the divorced families were living in the metropolitan area, with 23.3 percent of them in Gyeonggi Province and 20.6 percent in Seoul.
Meanwhile, the number of single-spouse families due to the death of a partner rose 10.3 percent to 2.02 million from 2005.
Over the same period, those who didn’t get remarried after the death of a spouse or a divorce increased 20.2 percent to 328.8 million, accounting for 19 percent of the total households.