1 in 10 couples live separately

By Kim Rahn

Kim and Shin, employees of a food distributor company in southern Seoul, married three years ago.

Despite working for the same company, they are rarely able to meet each other. The wife, Shin, was posted to the firm’s branch in China last year, being forced to live apart from her husband for more than a year. Her husband, Kim, lives alone in Seoul. They don’t have a child yet.

“We have only met for five times over the last one year. That was when she visited the head office here or came for the summer holidays. We have another year to go before she returns to Seoul,” Kim said.

Kim and Shin are not the only spouses forced to live separately. According to 2010 statistics from the Seoul Metropolitan Government, one out of 10 married couples in Seoul could not cohabit in Seoul because of educational reasons or job postings, domestically or overseas.

According to the data, some 211,000, or 9.5 percent of the total 2.2 million married couples in the city said they were not living together with their spouses.

The number of such couples has been on the rise — in 1995, it was some 131,000 couples, or 5.8 percent of the total married couples.

“Those couples were in situations where the husband or wife had a job or studied in other regions in the country or overseas; one of them was engaged in duties that required group cohabitation such as military service; or the wife took care of the children who were studying in other regions or countries,” city official Jeong Young-mi said.

Of the 211,000 households, 39.8 percent were living alone such as Kim, and about half of these were in their 40s or 50s.

Separate data showed that Seoul is seeing a lower number of married couples.

In 1995, some 2.27 million couples were married, but in 2010 the figure decreased by 2.3 percent to 2.22 million.

Jeong further said, “We think it is because more and more people in their 20s to 40s remain single and a growing number of middle-aged couples, among those in their 40s to 60s, divorce.”

For women aged between 25 and 29 — these used to be the prime ages to marry — some 40 percent of them were single in 1995, but this figure doubled to 80.2 percent in 2010.

In the case of men aged between 30 and 34, the percentage of singles jumped from 24.4 percent to 58.9 percent during the 15-year period.