hankyoreh

By Noh Hyun-woong, staff reporter

Middle-age couples married twenty years or more represented the largest portion of divorces last year in South Korea, data show.

This is the first time ever that their age group has come out first on the listing.

A Statistics Korea report on divorce and remarriage published on Dec. 10 showed 30,200 divorces among couples that had been married 20 years or more, representing 26.4% of the total. Another 28,200 divorces, or 24.7%, happened between couples married four years or less, the segment that had consistently ranked first in divorces since statistics were first kept in 1982.

That year, only 1,300 divorces, or 4.9% of the total, involved couples married for more than two decades. Thirty years later, that number has risen by 23.2 times, and the percentage has increased by 5.3 times.

The total number of divorces rose steadily through 2003 before dipping by an average of 4.1% each year between 2003 and 2012.

But for men over 60 and women over 50, the rise has not stopped.

As a reflection of the trend, the average length of marriage for divorced couples rose by 6.6 years from 7.1 in 1982 to 13.7 in 2012. Divorce has decreased among couples with at least one underage child, but spiked among those with none. The percentage of divorcing couples with an underage child dropped from 68.8% in 1993 to 52.8% in 2012, while the percentage with no underage child rose from 31.2% to 47.0% over the same period.

Analysts are viewing the trend as the result of longer life expectancy, improved quality of life, and changing social views on divorce.

In a related trend, late-life remarriages were found to be increasing sharply. Last year, a total of 565,000 women and 511,000 men remarried. The average age was 46.6 for men and 42.3 for women.

But those aged 50 or older represented the largest portion of remarriages. Women over 50 went from 6.0% of people remarrying in 1982 to 21.8% last year, while men over 50 went from 15.5% to 35.6%.

The crude divorce rate, which shows the number of divorces per thousand people, stood at 2.3 last year. The rate rose steadily from 0.7 to 3.4 between 1982 to 2003, but has dropped off ever since.

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