Can you guess which country has the highest proportion of gay weddings?
One country has more same-sex weddings than you’d think…
That’s right: according to the stats, Belgium has a higher proportion of gay weddings compared to all marriages than anywhere else.
A study from statistics website 10 and 3 looked at the ongoing prevalence of weddings across a period of time in early adopters – Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and the US state of Massachusetts – all of whom have had equality for around a decade.
The website asked: “After the initial flurry of excitement has died down, and the queues for marriages licenses at city hall have subsided, what happens next? How often are same-sex marriages actually performed in these countries?”
Digging into data sets from across the various countries with equality, the researchers found that some countries defy expectations of a ‘bubble’ and continue to host a large number of weddings – while others, like Portugal, now see a comparatively low number.
Comparing the rate of same-sex marriages per year to the rate of total marriages, there were widely different results.
Massachusetts, which legalised same-sex marriage back in 2004, technically leads with 38 per thousand (3.8%) – but this is likely to have been skewed by the vast number of people travelling from other US states to marry, before equality became commonplace.
Belgium led the pack, with 24 same-sex weddings per thousand marriages – accounting for 2.4% of the total number. At the other end is Portugal, with just 9 gay marriages per thousand (0.9%).
