In early February 2026, a Chosun Ilbo report captured a small but telling shift in South Korea’s love life: some young Koreans, frustrated with the domestic dating scene, are deliberately looking abroad—sometimes quite literally, by joining “dating trips” to Japan run by agencies that claim a success rate around 40%. The story lands because it fits a bigger reality: in a country where dating, marriage, and family formation have become tangled up with money, work hours, gender expectations, and anxiety about the future, “foreign partner” can start to look less like an exotic idea and more like a pragmatic option.
The macro picture helps explain why this is happening now. After the pandemic years, marriages in South Korea rebounded sharply: official statistics show about 222,000 marriages in 2024, up roughly 14.8% from 2023. At the same time, international (or “multicultural”) marriages have also been rising for several consecutive years, reaching about 21,450 in 2024. Even though that growth is real, their share of all marriages can still dip when domestic marriages grow faster; in 2024, international marriages accounted for about 9.6% of all marriages—roughly one in ten.
Who is marrying whom? The pattern remains strongly gendered. In 2024, about 71.2% of multicultural marriages were between Korean men and foreign women, while about 18.2% were between Korean women and foreign men; the remainder involved at least one naturalized spouse. That gender skew matters for motivation: it points to different pressures and incentives for men and women, and to the way “international partner search” is shaped by labor migration, marriage migration, and matchmaking industries, not only by romance.
Nationality data shows how regional and network-driven these matches can be. Among foreign wives in multicultural marriages, Vietnamese spouses were the largest group in 2024, followed by Chinese, and then Thai (with different outlets reporting slightly different shares, but the ordering is consistent). This aligns with decades of people-to-people ties, recruitment pathways, and diaspora networks that make certain pairings easier to form and support than others. It also underlines something often missed in glossy “K-content made Koreans popular” narratives: a lot of cross-border partnering is happening inside Asia, through familiar routes, not only via global dating apps.
Age patterns help locate the social story. One official summary reported that, among multicultural marriages, Korean husbands over 45 formed the largest share (32.7%), while wives in their late 20s were the single biggest group (23.4%), closely followed by wives in their 30s (23.0%). This does not mean “only older men marry foreigners,” but it does show that international marriage is often a solution pursued later in life by men who may feel boxed out of domestic marriage markets—whether because of rural-urban divides, income and housing pressures, or a shrinking pool of potential partners who want traditional arrangements. Meanwhile, younger Koreans who look abroad (like the Chosun Ilbo “Japan expeditions”) are part of a different slice: less about “last chance marriage,” more about trying to sidestep a dating culture they experience as exhausting, expensive, or emotionally high-risk.
So what’s driving the “look overseas” impulse among young and adult Koreans? Start with economics and time. Korea’s dating-and-marriage timeline is intertwined with brutal housing costs, career insecurity, and the expectation that couples should be “ready” (financially and socially) before committing. When the domestic script feels like a high-stakes investment, some people try alternative markets—whether that’s a foreign city break designed around meeting people, or cross-border dating via online communities where the first conversation isn’t immediately about apartment deposits and parental expectations.
Then there’s culture—both domestic gender politics and Korea’s global cultural footprint. The Chosun Ilbo piece explicitly ties overseas dating interest to the visibility of Korean pop culture (“K-content”), which can make Korean partners more “legible” and attractive to foreign audiences than they might have been a generation ago. That doesn’t automatically translate into healthy relationships, but it lowers barriers to entry: more foreigners are curious, more mixed friend groups form, and more Koreans feel that dating outside the country won’t be socially isolating or linguistically impossible.
But international unions also carry risks, and the question of stability matters if you’re writing about this as a social trend rather than a lifestyle fad. The newest topline divorce figures suggest a mixed picture that is not simply “international marriages fail more.” In 2024, multicultural divorces were reported at 7,992 cases, down about 2.0% from the year before. Meanwhile, overall divorces in Korea were about 91,000 in 2024, slightly down year-on-year. A decline in multicultural divorces alongside rising multicultural marriages can mean several things at once: improving support systems, changing composition of couples, or simply timing effects (newer marriage cohorts haven’t yet reached peak divorce years). The responsible takeaway is that these unions are neither uniformly fragile nor automatically stable; they sit inside the same pressures that strain domestic marriages—money, work, caregiving expectations—plus additional challenges like language, visas, discrimination, and the stress of being a “visible” couple in a still-homogeneous society.
In the end, “Koreans looking for foreign partners” is less a quirky headline than a signal of adaptation. When domestic dating feels like a narrowing corridor—economically costly, socially policed, and emotionally tiring—some people widen the map. For some, that means a curated trip to Japan with an agency and a promised success rate; for others, it’s an app, a study-abroad circle, a workplace with more foreign colleagues, or a community that formed around K-pop and turned into real-world intimacy. The data says the phenomenon is no longer marginal: about one in ten marriages now crosses a border. And as Korea’s demographic debate grows louder, these relationships are likely to be discussed not just as personal choices, but as part of what modern Korean family life is becoming—more diverse, more complicated, and increasingly international.
I’m not surprised. Not even a little. Every time I hear someone gasp, “Young Koreans are dating foreigners now?” I want to hand them a mirror and ask if they’ve actually looked at the dating landscape lately. Because if romance were a housing market, Korea’s would be Seoul prime real estate: wildly overpriced, emotionally exhausting, and everyone keeps telling you it’s “normal” to suffer through it.
Let’s be honest. Dating in Korea today is not about candlelight and long walks by the river. It’s about income brackets, apartment sizes, parental expectations, work schedules that eat your soul, and an unspoken checklist that makes LinkedIn profiles look spontaneous. Romance has become a performance review. Fail one metric and—sorry—you’re “not serious material.” Is it any wonder some people quietly decide to look elsewhere?
When young Koreans look abroad, they’re not chasing exotic fantasies. They’re chasing breathing space. A chance to be liked before being audited. A conversation that doesn’t start with real estate prices or end with, “My parents would never accept this.” For some, dating overseas—whether in Japan, Southeast Asia, or through global online circles—feels like stepping outside a suffocating script.
And yes, I can already hear the moral panic. What about stability? What about divorce? Please. Domestic marriages are hardly a sanctuary of emotional wellness. International unions come with challenges—language, visas, cultural friction—but at least many of them are built on intentional choice. People go into these relationships knowing they are different. That alone creates a level of honesty many local couples never get to practice.
There’s also an uncomfortable truth no one likes to say out loud: Korean gender politics are… tense. Some women are tired of carrying invisible labor while being told to “lower expectations.” Some men feel boxed out by economic pressure and rigid masculinity norms. Cross-border dating becomes a way to renegotiate roles, expectations, even tenderness itself. Not always successfully—but at least openly.
And before anyone gets smug about “foreign wives” or “marriage migration,” let’s remember this works both ways now. Korean women are also marrying foreign men in rising numbers, often because they want partnerships that feel less hierarchical and more human. Radical idea, I know.
So no, this isn’t a betrayal of Korean culture. It’s a symptom of a society asking too much from love while giving people too little room to be vulnerable. When the local dating ecosystem becomes inhospitable, people migrate. Not for novelty—but for survival.
Love, like labor, goes where it can still breathe. And frankly, who can blame them?