Just Saying | This is Hong Kong: no time for love, no interest in marriage and not enough men
Yonden Lhatoo reflects on a matchmaker’s insight into love and relationships in a city where time is money and the gender imbalance just keeps widening
Too busy and too choosy for love – that’s us in Hong Kong. And everything around us, from the inescapable rat race to the gender imbalance, seems primed to facilitate a single lifestyle.
The male-female ratio has been declining for the past three decades, and is now down to 852 men for every 1,000 women, particularly in the 20-39 age group.
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More people are leaving it until late to get married. The median marriage age for women is 29.4 and 31.4 for men.
Fewer people are tying the knot, too – the “never married” category of men has expanded nearly 61 per cent, and women, nearly 14 per cent.
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The old boom is over for Hong Kong men finding wives on the mainland – that number shrank from 28,145 in 2006 to 15,300 last year. Instead, more women from the city are marrying mainlanders, though the number was relatively small at 7,626 last year.
A couple meet at a matchmaking event for mostly mainland Chinese men and Hong Kong women, in Dongguan in 2013. Photo: AFP
