A marriage in Bulgaria lasts 15.9 years on average – statistics institute
There were 29 198 marriages registered in Bulgaria in 2019, a total of 237 more than in 2018, the National Statistical Institute (NSI) said on April 13 in a report on demographic processes.
On average, men in Bulgaria married for the first time at 32 and women at 29.1 years, the NSI said.
This meant that the age at first marriage for men had gone up by 0.3 years and for women by 0.4 years, it said.
Among 86.3 per cent of women and 85.8 per cent of men, marriages in 2019 were first-time.
There were 10 859 divorces in Bulgaria in 2019, a total of 263 more than in 2018.
Highest was the number of divorces by “mutual agreement” (66.7 per cent), followed by divorces due to “incompatibility of temperament” (22.8 per cent) and “virtual parting” (9.1 per cent).
For 9.9 per cent of women who divorced and 10.9 per cent of men who divorced in 2019, the divorce was not the first one, the NSI said.
It said that the average duration of a marriage in Bulgaria before divorce in 2019 was 15.9 years.
The NSI said that 61 882 children were born in Bulgaria in 2019, 61 538 (99.4 per cent) live born. The number of live births decreased by 659 children or 1.06 per cent compared with 2018.
Babies who were boys, 31 515, outnumbered girl babies by 1492.
As at December 31 2019, there were 1 464 000 women of fertile age in Bulgaria, a figure 27 000 lower than in 2018 and 186 000 lower than in 2011.
The number of children born to mothers younger than 18 years in 2019 was 2948.
The trend of children being born to mothers older than 40 was continuing, the NSI said. There were 2284 in 2019, compared with 2154 in 2018.
The mean age of women at first birth has increased from 27.2 in 2018 to 27.3 years in 2019. The mean age of women at first birth varied from 30.3 in Sofia to 22.9 in the Sliven district.
The number of children born outside marriage in Bulgaria in 2019 was 36 199, about 58.5 per cent of the total number of births.
The share of extramarital births in rural areas (64.6 per cent) was higher than in urban (56.4 per cent).
For 79.8 per cent of the extramarital births data on the fathers exists, that is most probably the children are being raised in families by parents cohabiting without marriage, the NSI said.
The highest shares of extramarital births were registered in the districts of Vratsa (76.6 per cent) and Lovech (74.8 per cent).
The share of extramarital births in all country regions is higher than 50 per cent except in the districts of Razgrad (47.8 per cent), Blagoevgrad (47.1 per cent), and Kurdzhali (32.5 per cent), the NSI said.
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( Photo: Kai Kuusik Greenbaum)
