People waiting longer before tying knot

By Kim Tong-hyung

Men on average are waiting until they are 32 before they get married, official figures showed Monday, indicating that people are leaving it later than before to tie the knot.

The average age at which a woman marries for the first time climbed from 24.8 in 1990 to 28.9 in 2010, according to a report by Statistics Korea. The average age for men has climbed from 27.9 to 31.8 during the period, after breaching the symbolic figure of 30 in 2004.

The average age at which men and women get married has been increasingly in recent years, adding to the headache of policymakers petrified over low birth rates and a dwindling workforce.

With millions of young people struggling to find work or suffering from stagnant income, marriage appears to be an item pushed further down their to-do list.

The 14.8 percent of men between the ages of 40 and 44 who weren’t married last year represented a dramatic increase from 2.6 percent in 1995. About 50 percent of men between 30 and 34 were unmarried in 2010, compared to 18.6 percent in 1995. The rate of unmarried men between 35 and 39 increased from 6.1 percent to 26.9 percent over the same period.

``The falling marriage rates have recently become a bigger social problem for men than women,’’ said the Population Association for Korea, which collaborated with Statistics Korea for the report.

``There needs to be an intensive study on whether the high proportion of unmarried people among men is a result of choice or something inevitable (due to social and economic reasons).’’

Interestingly, divorce rates increased rapidly for over three decades before starting to a decline in 2003 and appear to have stabilized in recent years.

The number of divorced couples among every 1,000 people increased by more than 14-fold between 1970 and 2003. However, the government data also showed that divorces were 40 percent less frequent last year than in 2003.

It also appears that couples are breaking up at an older age than before. The average age of divorced men increased from 40.1 in 2000 to 45 in 2010, while for women it increased from 36.5 to 41.4 over the same period.

Along with the staggeringly low birth rate, the declining marriage rate is a concern for government officials as they wonder how the decreasing workforce will manage to support society’s increasingly top-heavy structure.

The poor state of the economy has obviously been a leading factor in the deterioration of marriage rates. It has been disaster upon catastrophe for the county’s employment situation as recent figures show more than four out of 10 working-age Koreans, or around 16.6 million, either don’t have a job or have stopped looking for one.

The situation is particularly bleak for school leavers and graduates, triggering worries about an entire generation lost to joblessness, which probably don’t bode well for the future prospects of marriage rates.

``Korea is beginning to see a severed generation. People are not getting married because things are tough and things are tough because they can’t get a job,’’ said Kim Kwang-soo, founder and chief economist of the KS Economic Research Institute, in a social media posting.

``Jobs are the base of a person’s pride ― in that way, they are life itself. There needs to be study and debate about establishing an employment structure that improves living standards and quality of life.’’