Getting their groove back: Middle-aged singles in Korea navigate dating with caution and independence

For a while after her divorce, Cheong Eun-ju, a woman in her 50s, did not think about romance.

There was too much else in the way — the earning, the getting by, the slow reassembly of life. Then one afternoon at the supermarket she watched a couple push a cart together, and later, in a park, two people walking hand in hand, and a desire she thought she had put away for good came back.

“It wasn’t some enormous thing,” Cheong said. “I just thought — I used to do that too. Go to the mart together, walk holding hands in the park. And when that thought came, all of a sudden I wanted to date. Badly.” She later appeared on the dating reality show "Last Love" (2024), which exclusively features singles over 50.

Cheong belongs to a growing group in Korea: middle-aged people who choose to date without necessarily seeking marriage. Many of them arrive there after a divorce, often a late one.

The number of divorces has fallen in Korea for six consecutive years, but those who split up after staying married for more than 30 years has recorded an all-time high in 2025, according to data from Ministry of Data and Statistics. Divorces by couples married for more than 30 years accounted for 17.7 percent of all divorces in 2025, roughly double the percentage from a decade ago. The average divorce age in Korea is now 51 for men and 47.7 for women.

With life expectancy stretching well past what it once was, it has become only natural that middle-aged singles look for new romantic relationships. 

“Our generation is 10, 20 years younger than our parents were at this age,” said Liz Son, a Canada-based YouTuber who has run the midlife dating advice channel Liz TV for six years and now matches middle-aged singles at her own offline events. “The thinking used to be: once you’re alone, you live alone and die alone. Now it is: I’ll go find someone. I raised my kids, that’s done, now I’ll find my own life.”

How they date, however, is different from what it used to be.

The froth drains off

The first thing that changes in midlife dating is what you are looking at. Appearance counts less while character, temperament and lifestyle count more.

“When I was young I thought it was a big deal,” Cheong said. “I have a certain type, this is my style — all that. There was a lot of froth. Now the froth is gone, and what’s left is: who do I actually match with, who can I actually love. The center moved, so to speak.”

What she wants now from a significant other is a capacity to accept another person — and consideration too; the phrase she kept returning to was “the person’s character.”

Even for those who has never gone through a marriage hence a divorce echoes a similar sentiment.

Park (alias), a 53-year-old man who is dating for essentially the first time in his life, put the same thought more flatly: personality first, and “as long as the person’s character is good, everything else is fine.” He had never much cared about a partner’s income or job, and he cares even less about looks now.

Kim (alias), another never-married man in his mid-40s who ran a coffee shop for years and kept close to a thousand cafe patrons’ numbers in his phone, described the shift to midlife dating as a loss of nerve as much as a gain in wisdom.

“When I was younger, if someone showed even a little interest and had one good attribute, I’d just date them,” Kim said. Now he runs the film fast-forward before it starts. “I think about the future first. Will this last? Could I marry this person? I tick off the boxes and see the report card first.”

The wise-old wisdom of older people who used to insist that compatibility mattered had turned out to be right, according to Kim.

Set against all this personal maturing is a market fact in the other direction, which Son, who watches the whole field of midlife dating rather than her own heart, puts it this way: at the level of the market, looks matter more now, not less.

“This is completely different from our parents’ generation,” Son said. “Now both men and women look hard at appearance — because people are looking for a dating partner, not a marriage partner. Dating means the physical, too, it means feeling something. So even a man worth tens of billions of won gets turned down if there’s no attraction.”

A calculator in each hand

Son’s blunter image for midlife dating is a used-car lot.

“These are all people with some baggage — that’s what a divorce means, and it’s never a hundred percent the other person’s fault,” son said. “And yet they show up wanting a brand-new car.”

The midlife dater arrives carrying all of that past experience, and are “priced” accordingly, according to Son.

“Young people know nothing, so they think, I’ll just try a life with this person,” she said. “Those in midlife think too much. Everyone shows up holding a calculator, and everyone runs the numbers.”

What most of them are running the numbers toward, though, is rarely marriage.

Son, who has matched hundreds of midlife singles, said the preference for dating or companionship over a second marriage is not close — far more people want the former. The divorced tend to be the most wary: having been through one marriage that ended, they are in no hurry to bind themselves into another.

“Dating carries no burden, and you keep your own life, you date, you get some healing, some energy,” Cheong said. Remarriage is a different order. “If I was the number one, remarriage means lowering myself to a half number and merging with someone again.”

In her heart, a relationship or a companion is enough; she would be careful about anything more, according to Cheong.

Kim, from years inside the online dating world, put the same reluctance in its sharpest form based on his experience.

“Divorced men who have no intention of remarrying — that’s 99 out of a hundred,” he said. “But a lot of them pretend they’re actually looking for it.”

Men perform the intention, he said, because it is what many of the women he has met wanted to hear, and the performance has bought him a relationship. His reasoning was coldly practical: a person who can support himself sees little reason to take on the support of anyone else.

“Earning 3 million won [$1,960] a month, you can live a genuinely fun life,” he said. “Why would I feed and house one more person? Unless she's perfect — money, looks, all of it — I just don’t.”

Picking stars from the sky

Whatever midlife daters are looking for, the harder problem is finding anywhere to look — the one point on which every source agreed.

“Here it’s the provinces outside of Seoul, and there’s genuinely no chance to meet anyone organically,” Park said. He had met his girlfriend through a setup by his older sister.

What he wanted instead was for the government to build something honest — a social enterprise, some public push to encourage marriage for the middle-aged rather than only subsidize childbirth and younger marriage.

Kim, whose world was cafes, dating apps, neighborhood Karrot Market meetups and open chat rooms, was equally bleak about anything that wasn’t those routes of meeting someone. Natural, unarranged meeting — the kind Korean singles call jamanchu (an abbreviation of the Korean words for “natural meeting” — Kim rated at a difficulty akin to “picking stars from the sky.”

“At our age, unless someone introduces you, a natural meeting is a truly, truly rare thing,” Kim said.

Even when a jamanchu happens, the fear of meeting someone whose background is unknown remains a major hurdle for middle-aged singles.

“The biggest thing those dating in midlife are afraid of is safety — that they'll meet a con artist, a gold-digger, someone who takes their assets or their peace of mind,” she said.

The events Son hosts through her YouTube channel — hotel mixers, three-day gatherings in Gyeongju and Busan — try to rebuild that vouching at scale; last year in Busan, 66 people came to one of her matchmaking events and 32 left as a couple.

Son’s more radical answer is distance itself: global romance, a partner two time zones away, which she says satisfies the two midlife wishes that otherwise cancel out — someone on your side, and your own life kept intact.

“The couples who meet every single day are the ones who break up easily,” Son said. “Long distance stays tender. You’re always missing them.”

Mine is love, theirs scandal 

Which leaves the oldest questions: once someone has actually found a partner, is dating in midlife easier than it is for the young — and how much social stigma remains around it?

Cheong went on the dating program half-expecting to find her “dating cells” dead, and found instead that they were not.

“I realized I’ll be like this at 80, even,” Cheong said. “Dating is hard, and it’ll be hard till the day I die.”

Kim thinks that is nonsense: “That is a drama line. In reality it isn’t like that at all.”

The people who keep dating cycle partners every few months, “and the ones who can’t date in the first place keep not dating — because they don’t take care of themselves,” Kim said.

The two are not really disagreeing. Kim is counting meetings, which are abundant for anyone presentable; Cheong is weighing the difficulty of meeting a good partner, which in her mind is almost unobtainable.

Son, who has matched hundreds of midlife singles, say although the stigma around older people dating has eased, it hasn't lifted completely. And the proof of that, Son said, is in how many still won't admit they are looking for a significant other. 

“Deep down they’re desperate to meet someone, but they won’t say it out loud, because they’re so conscious of how they’ll be seen — people gossiping, saying things like ‘That woman, why is she chasing a partner like that,’” Son said.

“The mentality is: When I do it, it's romance; when someone else does it, it’s an affair. That double standard is still very strong.”

Regardless of how much stigma actually remains, how strongly it's felt depends on who you ask. 

Park and Kim, both men, weren't so bothered by how they would be perceived. 

“It’s completely changed. So many people never marry now — the mood is welcoming, if anything,” Park said.

“Who has any interest in someone else’s love life?” Kim said, along the same lines.

Cheong is of the opposite opinion. 

“It’s a really hard subject, and even a small remark can wound,” Cheong said. A passing line — “Why do you think she got divorced?” — is rarely aimed at her, “But the second it’s said, I think, I’d better not let on that I'm a divorced woman."

Their advice for dating in midlife was surprisingly devoid of romance.

Be completely honest from the first day — your finances, your values, what you want — and the thing lasts longer for it, Park advised. Son encouraged people to stop waiting for the 100-percent person five years from now and take the 60-percent one in front of you, and remember that “the person who likes you is your ideal type.”

Cheong’s counsel is to be more forward and outgoing. If you like someone, there is no sense waiting for them to come to you first.

What none of them offered was the reassurance that it gets simple even when dating at an older age.

“So many of my friends want to meet someone,” Park said, near the end of the interview, not sounding especially hopeful about it. “There’s just not much prospect for anyone if you sit idly by. That’s how it is.”

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]