Catholic Church says Australia is suffering a man drought, warns women not to be too picky
Pope Benedict XVI (C) celebrates the Lord’s Passion on Good Friday on April 22, 2011 at Saint Peter’s Basilica at The Vatican. Benedict celebrates the Passion of the Lord in the afternoon before presiding over the stations of the Cross, re-enacting Jesus Christ’s final hours and crucifixion, later in the evening at Rome’s Colosseum.
How do you know if he's "the one?" Check to make sure that he has a pulse and isn't already married to someone else. In other words, don't be too picky, at least according to the Catholic Church in Australia.
"Are women getting too choosy? I'd say yes," Father Tony Kerin from the Archdiocese of Melbourne told the Herald Sun of Australia. "I think many are setting aside their aspirations for later, but by the time they get around to it, they've missed their chance."
Kerin's comments came in light of research by demographer Bernard Salt. According to Salt, there are 1.3 million women and 1.343 million men between the ages of 25 to 34 living in Australia, the Herald Sun reported. But of those 1.3 million men, only 86,000 are actually "marriage material," because the other men are already married, gay or in a serious relationship, according to Salt's calculations. Salt himself, however, seems a little picky: he also excluded men who are single parents and men who earn less than $60,000 a year.
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Concerns about a "man drought" in Australia are not new. BBC News reported in 2008 that there were 100,000 more females than males living in Australia, and the gender imbalance was especially bad in Australia's coastal cities. The imbalance was caused by thousands of Australian men in their 20s and 30s leaving the country to travel or to find work, according to the BBC.
And the Australian Bureau of Statistics says that between 1990 and 2001, the "crude marriage rate" declined from 6.9 to 5.3 marriages per 1,000 population.