Finland: Mixed marriages three times more likely to end in divorce

Finland: Mixed marriages three times more likely to end in divorce

The relationship is more likely to break down if the husband is Finnish, and Finnish men tend to marry Filipino, Thai or Russian women. Mixed marriages with Finnish women, whose mixed marriages tend to be with immigrants from Muslim countries, are more stable.

Helsingin Sanomat also has an interview with a Finnish woman who married a Muslim immigrant.

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Marriages made across cultural lines have appreciably smaller chances of succeeding than those made within the mainstream Finnish population.


This is the rather grim prognosis for mixed marriages in Finland, where a union between a Finnish and a foreign partner is almost three times as likely to end in separation and divorce as one in which both spouses are of Finnish origin.


The less than appealing numbers have come from Elli Heikkilä, Research Director of the Institute of Migration, and Tarja Niemi, Chairman of the Union of Multicultural Families, who have carried out a study of mixed marriages.


At the same time, they only confirm calculations made by Statistics Finland from 2007.


For every 100 marriages between two Finnish partners, the figure for divorces in a single year was 1.3. The corresponding figure for mixed marriages was nearly three times greater.


Of the marriages celebrated in Helsinki in 2007, a total of 14.4% were between a Finnish citizen and a foreigner.


Nearly half of all multicultural knots in Finland are tied in the Greater Helsinki area.


Gender does seem to matter in the divorce statistics: if the man is a Finn and the woman a foreigner, the relationship is more likely to break down than in the case of a Finnish wife and a foreign husband.


"The more distant the culture, the more often a marriage ends in separation", comments Elli Heikkilä, by way of an explanation for the imbalance leading to Finnish men parting more often from their foreign wives.


Finnish men tend quite often to find a foreign spouse from the Philippines or Thailand.Russian brides are also quite common.


Finnish women, on the other hand, tend to marry "outside of the fold" with men from Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East and Turkey.


"Roughly 60 per cent of the immigrants coming into Finland do so for family reasons, accompanying a spouse", says Tarja Niemi.


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Source: HS (English)