One thing I’ve been thinking about (in no small part spurred by liz’s post on smart women), is the age at which we get married. For example, from what I can see on the Internet, the average age for a first marriage in Korea in 2009 for men is 31.6; for women it’s 28.7. In the U.S., it’s 28.7 for men and 26.5 for women. The average ages for China and Japan are comparable to Korea, in case you were wondering.
Why is this? Here are a number of highly suspect reasons:
- Higher education levels. There is a positive correlation between your level of education and getting married at a late age. Part of that might simply be the amount of time required to get all those advanced degrees. And you can’t deny that Korea places a strong emphasis on education while the U.S. is, ah, not doing awesome there.
- Mandatory military service. Korean men are required to spend two years in the military with relatively little outside contact, which could definitely be a factor here. But since this doesn’t explain the gap between women, let’s call it a minor factor.
- Social immaturity. This is related to the first point in education, but in my experience, Korean kids spend most of their formative years doing nothing but studying. Study, study, study. Often, there is very little interaction with the opposite sex until college. While I am calling it “social immaturity” for lack of a better term, this definitely cuts down on teenage pregnancy and shotgun weddings, which I’m sure is pushing down the American average.
- Those damn dramas. Korean soap operas have been continuing to grow in popularity; I singlehandedly blame a “soap opera” mentality for one of my cousins getting married so late. You are inculcated with these romantic ideas in popular culture, and you wait around for Mr./Ms. Right….until like forever. While maybe this could account for an increase in marrying age in Korea over the years, not sure it accounts for the difference with the U.S., which also seems obsessed with fairy-tale weddings.
- Lower rates of divorce. Less people get divorced in Korea; so maybe they just take more time to pick carefully? But not sure that this makes sense either, since the rate of divorce is rising at the same time that the age of marriage is rising.
I don’t really know what the reason is, though I think the education one sounds pretty good. If I had to put my eggs in a basket, I’d go with that.
But if anything, doesn’t it seem like it should be the other way around? And not simply because Koreans generally live with their parents until they get married (I would imagine that they would want to get married as quickly as possible just to get out of the damn house). But isn’t it an almost universal gripe of the second generation that our parents are pressuring us to get married, and get married quickly, and don’t we somehow write them off as being “typical Korean (or Asian) parents”? Isn’t it strange that we would think of our parents as more “traditional” than American parents, which, by logical extension, would include insisting on marriage at an earlier age? Is this cliche wrong? Or are we simply not listening? Is it a more “Asian” thing to do to delay marriage?
What I’m really curious about is what the numbers would be for my generation of Korean-Americans. Are we between the American numbers and the Korean numbers (which is my guess)? Or are we getting married even later than the Korean-Koreans? If so, what does that mean? I actually postulated a whole post under the assumption that the average age would for Korean-Americans would be less than the age for Korean-Koreans, then realized I have no proof for that assertion.
This is a post of many questions; I’m curious as to people’s thoughts on the topic (and if they have any supporting stats, even better). I only know one thing, though: I’m really going to mess up the average when I have my first wedding at age 73.
liz
super-interesting, chris. i don’t have much to add to this — i think all of your reasons are really astute and make a lot of sense — but i do think it’s interesting, and ironic, that we write off parental pressure to get married as “traditional” when people in the motherland actually get married later. but first-generation pressure on the second generation to marry is undeniable, so what does it actually stem from?
i wonder if it’s more of a generational thing than a cultural thing. i.e., i wonder if the average marrying age was younger when our parents lived in asia, and they brought that mindset with them to the states while people still living in asia started marrying later. or i wonder if there’s something about the immigrant experience — wanting their children to have the sense of security that they didn’t always have, wanting their children to accomplish the goals that they came here for, that sense of always being in survival mode even after they’ve established themselves — has something to do with it. i’m going to keep pondering this.