Boom in matchmaking defies all-time low marriages

Births and marriages at all-time lows, and evolving social views that say marriage is no longer a must — but a boom in matchmaking? A seemingly paradoxical phenomenon is taking place in Korea as people try to balance old values with new ones.

[SHUTTERSTOCK]

Births and marriages at all-time lows, and evolving social views that say marriage is no longer a must — but a boom in matchmaking? A seemingly paradoxical phenomenon is taking place in Korea as people try to balance historical values with emerging ones.

Duo Information, the largest matchmaking firm in Korea, saw a record-high revenue of 38.2 billion won ($29.2 million) last year, up 5.2 percent on year, according to the Financial Supervisory Service’s electronic disclosure system.

Duo’s revenue had lingered around the-28 billion-won mark until 2020, but jumped 35.9 percent since then as more people look to outsource the process of “finding the one.”

“Entering a relationship organically was always an unspoken motto for me when I was in my 20s, but I grew tired of push-pull relationships at some point,” said Han Ji-yul, a 34-year-old banker who works in western Seoul.

Han recently applied for a membership at a matchmaking company as he wanted to “get down to business,” saving time and energy at the stage of getting to know each other.

“It may not be the most romantic approach, but it is certainly a more practical one,” he argued.

Han will find out his “tier” in the matchmaking candidate pool in the coming weeks. He will then decide whether to have his looks, height, weight, body shape, age, occupation, approximate salary, plans for children, and even his family background, including his parents’ jobs and their pension coverage, filed for a potential match.

Duo, established in 1995, has helped 46,984 members tie the knot as of June 26. Some 7,000 members found their partners through Duo between 2019 and 2022 — meaning six Duo members walked down the aisle every day during the period.

In contrast, Koreans were spending less time on dating apps, widely regarded as a means for a casual hookup or a fun fling in the conservative Asian country.

Of the 1,000 people surveyed last year by a local research firm M-Brain Trend Monitor, one out of two people said meeting someone via a dating app is unreliable and unbefitting of a serious relationship.

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Post-pandemic deregulations put a damper on online speed dating. The monthly active users (MAU) on the top 10 dating apps with the highest sales in Korea rose around 50 percent since the Covid outbreak to 1.31 million in May, according to big data tracker Mobile Index in April last year. These apps' MAU remained above 1 million until November 2021 and fell to 960,000 in March 2022.

Korea was one of the fastest-declining markets for dating apps, spending $18 million less on apps like Tinder or Bumble last year than they did in 2021, according to San Francisco-based mobile data tracker data.ai. U.S.-based users burned $268 million, Canadians $59 million, and Indians $31 million more last year than the year before.

The surge in Duo’s sales is ironic considering the plunging number of marriages in Korea in the past decade. There were 191,960 new marriages last year, Statistics Korea said in a report on marriage released in March. The number was the lowest yearly figure since the statistics agency began compiling data in 1970 and an eleventh consecutive decline.

The number of marriages in April fell to 14,475, the lowest-ever tally for the month.

The Covid-19 pandemic that discouraged all forms of meetings accelerated the descent. Marriages dropped by 25.3 percent between 2018 and 2021, after falling by 13.4 percent between 2014 and 2017.

Koreans’ changing views about marriage played a role in the collapse, poll data showed.

Of the 2,041 people between the ages of 18 and 34 surveyed by the National Youth Policy Institute (NYPI) in 2021, 39.1 percent said marriage was “necessary.” In 2016, 56 percent of the 2,534 people surveyed said the same.

Marriage has largely become a personal choice for most Koreans in recent years, with 54.3 percent of people saying they may choose to or choose not to get married, up 14.2 percentage points from five years before. Less than 7 percent said marriage was “unnecessary.”

“A change in values on marriage seems to be one of the reasons why the number of marriages and crude marriage rate hit all-time lows,” Lim Young-il, director of the population census division at Statistics Korea told reporters in March.

The crude marriage rate, or the number of marriages per 1,000 people, dropped to 3.7 last year.

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Experts say matchmakers are enjoying a niche market as more people like Han are trying to “get it over with” as soon as possible.

“People have less time and patience to spend on normal dates in an extremely competitive society,” said Kwak Geum-joo, a psychology professor at Seoul National University. “Those who outsource the spouse-finding process might be looking to get married just for the sake of marriage itself [...] rather than love.”

The prevailing view in Korea that sees marriage as one of the keys to a “successful life” is why people are reluctantly looking for an “artificial match,” according to the psychology professor.

“Matchmaking companies arrange blind dates and let people skip to the part where they can choose to start a relationship with a partner who meets their social and financial standards,” Kwak added.

The financial burden that accompanies new marriages, mainly from buying a new house, topped the list of reasons people choose not to get married, at 51.7 percent on average between 2017 and 2021, the NYPI survey said. It outpaced all other reasons by a solid margin, tripling each year's second-highest reason on average.

“In the past, newlyweds could get their own place by themselves, but this is near impossible nowadays. Such conditions increased the social value of financial assets, intensifying materialism and consumption,” Kwak assessed.

Of the 2,932 Duo members who got married between June 2020 and May 2022 surveyed by the matchmaker, 47 percent of men were earning more than 70 million won. The median annual income was 65 million won for men and 42 million won for women. Both figures were twice what they were in 2005.

Should a man and woman earning median incomes become a couple, their average income places them well above the average household, according to Statistics Korea’s report on the financial status of Korean households released in December.

The average household income in Korea in 2021 was 64.1 million won. A median Duo couple would earn around 107 million won, placing them in the second-highest quintile of the income bracket.

BY SOHN DONG-JOO [sohn.dongjoo@joongang.co.kr]