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By Lee Min-hyung
Kim, a female office worker in her 30s who wished to be identified only by her surname, says she is not in a hurry to get married. She says she wants to live her own life by developing her career path more sustainably and successfully.
"More women, including myself, appear to delay their marriage plans than before, as most of them have their own careers in society, which was not the case back in the 1980s and 1990s when the notion of housewife was much more prevalent," she said.
Jeong, a professor at a college in Seoul who got married a few years ago, said she decided to get married only after being hired by the school. She was in her early 40s.
"I was anxious about not meeting the right person at the right time when I was young, but now I think I got married at just the right time. As we both made some achievements in our careers, we kind of enjoy stability in life."
Recent data reveals that more women delay getting married until the age of 40 nowadays.
The number of brides in their early 40s outnumbered those in their early 20s for two consecutive years (in 2021 and 2022), according to data from Statistics Korea.
The number of brides aged between 40 and 44 reached 10,412 in 2021, and those between 20 and 24 stood at 9,985. This was the first time that the older age bracket surpassed the younger one since 1990, when the statistics agency started compiling the relevant data.
Data also showed that the number of marriages has been declining sharply for more than two decades. In 1997, the figure totaled 388,960, but it plunged to 191,690 last year. This is a drop of around 51 percent. In particular, the number of brides aged between 20 and 24 witnessed the sharpest decline at 93 percent. In contrast, the figure for those in their early 40s increased by 50 percent.
This was due to demographic changes represented by the falling birth rate and an aging population. The number of women in their early 20s here declined to 1.45 million in 2022 from 2.04 million in 1997, a drop of 29.2 percent. But those in their early 40s rose to 1.95 million last year, an increase of 16.3 percent from 1.68 million in 1997.
Another factor is the change in social perception that marriage is not a must for people's lives. A survey conducted by the statistics agency last year showed that those in their 20s were the most pessimistic age group on marriage, excluding teenagers, with only 35.1 percent of them saying that they have plans to get married. But more than 40 percent of those in their 40s remained optimistic about marriage in the same survey.
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