20,000 couples have tied the knot in 20 years of gay marriage in NL

Twenty years after gay marriage became legal in the Netherlands, 19,000 men and 21,000 women have tied the knot with someone of the same sex, national statistics agency CBS said on Tuesday.

In 2001, 42% of the couples had already formalized their relationship in a registered partnership, but that figure has shrunk to just 3% in the past five years, now the official partnerships are no longer necessary, the CBS said.

The figures also show around 400 gay couples get divorced every year, with women almost twice as likely as men to separate. Just over a quarter of gay women will divorce within 10 years, compared with 14% of gay men and 16% of heterosexual couples.

The Netherlands was the world’s first country to legalise marriages between people of the same sex, followed by Belgium, Spain, Canada and South Africa.