According to reports of Shanghai's media, a survey of the city's 19 district marriage registration bureaus revealed that last year, 27,374 couples registered for divorces, averaging 75 couples per day, up 38.9 percent over the previous year.

What concerns people most is that amongst the divorcing couples, 7.2 percent are married for less than one year.

Many factors caused the rise in divorce rates. But, in the eyes of many couples, divorce seems to be not a tragedy but the path to seek the next round of happiness.

Marriage experts generally feel that in treating the problem of divorce, young couples are not that bound by traditional concepts. They rarely treat divorce as a sad or embarrassing matter. Instead, they view it as the beginning of a new life.

Divorce statistics reveal that amongst the divorced couples last year, 56.1% attribute the main reason of their separation to personality incompatibility, meaning that 15,365 couples parted ways because they had personality conflict. Another 9,234 couples put the reasons of splitting up as breakdown of mutual feelings.

More and more new reasons now surface as causes for marital breakups. It was learned that beside personality incompatibility and breakdown of mutual feelings, 567 couples cited economic reasons, 82 couples mentioned inability to tolerate bad habits.

What is most striking is that more and more couples are willing to face the problem of extra-marital affairs, with 1,079 couples frankly admitting to infidelity as the cause for breaking up.

(Chinanews.cn August 27, 2005)