Brides Are Getting Older

Korean women are marrying later in life if at all, so that there are now more blushing brides in their 30s than in their 20s. 

According to Statistics Korea on Tuesday, there were 76,900 women in their 30s in 2021 who accounted for nearly half or 49.1 percent of all first-time brides. Next came 71,263 in their 20s or 45.5 percent, but numbers are also growing among women in their 40s (6,564 or 4.2 percent). This is the first time that 30-something brides have outnumbered those in their 20s.

In case of men, 30-somethings also made up the biggest group of bridegrooms with 99,000 or 61.7 percent, more than double the number in their 20s (44,000 or 27.6 percent).  

More remarkable is that brides are increasingly older than their husbands, accounting for a whopping 19.2 percent of all couples in their first marriage and up 0.7 percentage points from a year earlier. The proportion of couples where grooms are older than their brides fell apace to 64.2 percent, down 1.1 percentage points.

Some 16.6 percent of couples were the same age. 

These changes brought the average age of first-time brides to 31.1 years and that of first-time grooms to 33.4 years. As recently as 1990 it was 24.8 years for brides and 27.8 years for grooms.