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1 in 4 Married Men Likely to Divorce

One in four married men are likely to get divorced. The more the highly-educated people are, the less they will likely they are to divorce.

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Among married men who left school before finishing their education the proportion is as high as 48 percent. Among men with a high-school diploma the chances drop to 30 percent, and among university graduates to 20 percent.

According to a report by Statistics Korea's analysis of census and annual marriage data from 1990 to 2010, the chance of divorce among men rose from 10.4 percent in 1990 to 25.1 percent in 2010, up 2.5 times over the last 20 years.

Kim Soo-young at Statistics Korea said, "Although individual circumstances and social values have a big impact, divorce got more common due to the prolonged slump after the 1997 Asian financial crisis".

The chances of divorce among married women also rose from 9.9 percent to 24.7 percent over the same period.

The number of remarriages has declined. In 1990, more than seven out of 10 couples who divorced chose to remarry, but that dropped to half by 2010.

The number of men and women who choose to stay single also rose. In 1990, only one in 11 men chose to stay single, but that rose to one in every five by 2010. The ratio for women rose from 5.1 percent to 15.1 percent over the same period.

The trend seems to stem from a view that marriage brings no great benefits and living alone gets easier and more convenient.

The changes in marriage trends are more pronounced among men than women, apparently due to an increasingly tough job market and layoffs in a society where men are still predominantly the breadwinners.

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