SHAH ALAM - Malaysia is the third most populous single nation in Southeast Asia, according to the most recent SeaAsia Stats report.
The report showed a staggering 44.68 per cent of Malaysians were single, tailing behind Brunei with 44.9 per cent and the singlehood champion - Philippines with 49 per cent.
Cambodia comes in fourth with 44.6 per cent, completing the top 40 per cent.
Myanmar ranks fifth with 29 per cent of single individuals, followed by Thailand with 23 per cent, Indonesia (22 per cent), Singapore (20 per cent), Laos (17 per cent) and Vietnam with 17 per cent.
Completing the top 10 of single persons in the region was Timor-Leste with 13 per cent.
The chart defines a single person as someone who is unmarried, divorced, separated or widowed.
From 1970 to 2021, the United Nations (UN) gathered marriage data on over 1.6 billion singles worldwide and the division that overlooked this was UN Population Division.
They were part of the intergovernmental organisation’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs and was tasked with conducting demographic research and supporting intergovernmental processes at the UN in the area of population and development.
The above statistics were part of the division’s Family Planning Indicators 2022, which was based on data collected and projected from 1970 to 2030.
For projections, the UN Population Division said the country-specific data was compiled in World Contraceptive Use 2022 as of July 2022.
Coincidently, the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) also recently released its latest statistics on the Malaysian population.
DOSM data showed that the Malaysian population was now at 33.7 million as of the end of December 2023, a growth of two per cent from 2022.
Do note that 2.7 million of the population in the country were non-citizens.
Furthermore, men outnumbered women in Malaysia, with there being 110 men for every 100 women in our country.
Specifically, there were 17.7 million men and 16 million women in Malaysia.
Reports have stated that when you combine both statistics, it meant that there was approximately 15,057,160 singles in Malaysia.