The nation’s divorce rate has been declining steadily over the past decade and contrary to a traditional belief that couples divorce because of the “seven-year itch,” married couples are most prone to divorce in the sixth year of marriage, the Ministry of the Interior said.
A total of 58,037 married couples split up last year, lower than the average annual number of 63,230 couples recorded between 2002 and 2006, the ministry said in a press statement.
The average annual divorce rate from 2007 to last year was even lower, at 57,443, marking a roughly 10 percent fall from the 2002 to 2006 period, the statement said.
The number of couples who split in the first half of this year also dropped 1.8 percent from the same period last year, ministry officials said.
Official statistics show that the divorce rate peaked at 64,995 in 2003, when an average of 179 married couples parted ways each day. The number has since declined, with about 159 couples divorcing per day last year.
Among the couples who divorced last year, 31 percent had been married for five to nine years; 27.7 percent had been married fewer than five years; while the divorce rate for couples married for more than nine years declined in conjunction with the number of years they were married, the ministry’s statistics showed.
In 2003, 40 percent of couples divorced in their first year of marriage, but this ratio has also seen a steady decline, ministry officials said, adding that last year, two other groups — those with one full year of marriage and those married for six full years — had registered the highest divorce rate at 30 percent each.
Wang Yun-tung (王雲東), a National Taiwan University sociology professor, wrote in a recent article that high divorce rates can be related to better education and more job opportunities for women, as well a rising trend toward individualism.
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