By Coconuts Hong Kong January 16, 2015 / 13:19 HKT
There’s a reason why marketing for Valentine’s Day specials and promotions are becoming increasingly desperate: apparently love is a dying art in Hong Kong.
The Census and Statistics Department revealed that between 1991 and 2011, the proportion of “never married males” over the age of 15 (who gets married at 15?) increased from 27.8 percent to 33.5 percent, slightly over a third.
The proportion of “never married females” also increased from two out of 10 women to three out of 10 (20.3 percent to 29.2 percent).
That means people are both getting married later and also just never tying the knot.
Those who are getting hitched now are more likely to get divorced, with the divorce rate almost three times higher in 2013 than in 1991.
In more depressing news, divorced women are less likely to get remarried than divorced men.
We would wager that this is thanks to the messed up but prevalent social conceptions that men age like a fine wine, while women degenerate like a rotting piece of meat.
Case in point: in that 20-year period, the ratio of widows to widowers remained between four to one and five to one, because “Hong Kong men tended to marry wives who were younger than themselves, thereby hastening the state of widowhood.”
“Hastening the state of widowhood” has got to be one of the saddest phrases we’ve ever heard.
When they broke down the stats by level of education, they found that women who have had more schooling are less likely to be married, while men still get married at roughly the same rates whether they had been to only primary school or if they had attained a university education.
Interestingly, marriages between Hong Kong residents made up only 52.2 percent of those registered in 2013, while marriages between Hongkongers and mainland Chinese people made up a whopping 38 percent.
Oof. Maybe we should use Valentine's Day to get our romantic affairs in order.
Read the full report here.
Photo: Jenson Lee via Flickr
http://hongkong.coconuts.co/2015/01/16/hongkongers-getting-married-later-and-later-more-and-more-getting-divorced
