Valentine's Day 2020: Romanians get married later in life, divorce less than before (analysis)

Romanians get married at older ages than 30 years ago and they divorce much less, a sign of the fundamental changes that the Romanian society went through after the 1989 Revolution, shows an analysis carried out by the consulting company Frames.

"In 2020, marriage has turned into an event that many young people try to postpone as much as possible. This does not mean that they ignore their feelings, but they express them less formally, without getting married so quickly. 30 years ago Romanians were celebrating, for the first time, Valentine's Day on February 14, the Western lovers' day. The official statistics, analyzed by experts from the consulting company Frames, show that in 1990, young people were much more determined to join their destinies than now. Men got married on average at the age of 25, and women at 22. Since then, the average age of young people at their first marriage has increased dramatically, reaching, in 2018, 31.9 years for men, and at 28.7 years in the case of women," says the said source.

The Frames analysis also shows that the number of marriages has decreased by almost 50,000 in the last 30 years. In 1990, there were 192,652 marriages registered at the Civil Registry Offices, and in 2018 only 143,292. The negative record for marriages was registered in 2011, when the National Institute of Statistics reported a total number of 105,599 marriages.

According to experts, the reasons for postponing marriages are related to the major changes that the Romanian society has gone through, from education, the influence of mass-media and social media and the career-related aspirations, to the economic situation of the couple.

At European level, Romania is among the countries with a high marriage rate, of 7.3pct, and the number of divorces, in 2018, is at one of the lowest levels in the last 30 years, with a rate of 1.5pct.

The Frames analysis was conducted based on the statistical data on the dynamics of marriages and divorces in Romania, from 1990-2018, the last year for which there are final official data.