Our country has twenty thousand same-sex couples, according to figures from Statistics Netherlands. The statistics office investigated this following the opening of the civil wedding, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary on Thursday.
At the beginning of this year, more than 19,000 men and almost 21,000 women were married to someone of the same sex, according to the preliminary figures. More than 1.4 thousand men and 1.1 thousand women from this group were married in 2001; so they may be celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary this year.
Furthermore, it appears that in the past five years, on average, more women (751) than men (619) married someone of the same sex each year.
In general, the marriage of two women does not last as long: of the women who married another woman in 2010, 26 percent were divorced after just under ten years. For married male couples, this percentage is 14, which is comparable to married couples consisting of a man and a woman (16 percent).
Most same-sex couples in urban areas
In total, seventeen out of every thousand people who are married as of 2001 are in a same-sex relationship. This share is higher in urban areas: in Amsterdam the share of same-sex marriages is highest at 45 per 1,000 married, followed by Nijmegen (35 per 1,000) and Arnhem (28 per 1,000).
In Urk and in Woudenberg this number is much smaller: there less than 1 in 1,000 married people is married to someone of the same sex.
In several cities, the anniversary will be commemorated on Thursday. For example, throughout Amsterdam, where the first marriage with people of the same sex was concluded, rainbow flags and a wedding cake sails through the canals. In Utrecht marries Mayor Sharon Dijksma that day a couple of the same sex.
20 years after the introduction of same-sex marriage 20 thousand gay couples
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