Fewer gay couples choosing to marry in Emmen. The South-East Drents municipality is bottom of the rankings for places where homosexual couples have their ceremonies.
Only 0.5 percent of marriages in the municipality are between two men and one percent of marriages are between two women. The southeastern municipality of Drenthe is therefore dangling at the bottom of the list of the largest Dutch municipalities. Groningen is more popular, with a fifth place in the rankings, whilst Leeuwarden sits 18th.
Homosexual marriage has been legal, with the same rights as heterosexual marriage, since 2001: perhaps unsurprisingly, given the tolerant reputation of the Netherlands, it was the first country in the world to legislate for same-sex partnerships.
16,000 same-sex marriages
Over the past nine years, more than 16,000 same-sex couples have been married in the Netherlands, according to RTV Drenthe. In total, this is around 2.4 percent of the total number of marriages. This percentage is higher in many large cities, while fewer people of the same sex marry in smaller and more rural municipalities: though this is certainly more of a trend than a rule.
In Groningen 1,4 percent of marriages were between two men, and 2 percent were between two women. Only in Amsterdam, Nijmegen, Arnhem and Maastricht there are more gay marriages. Leeuwarden had numbers of 1,2 percent (two males) and 1,5 percent (two females).
Most gay marriages in Amsterdam
In Amsterdam most marriages take place between same-sex couples. In the last nine years, 5.6 percent of the commitments have been made between homosexual couples. That is three times as much as in another big city like Rotterdam, and perhaps underlines the fame of Amsterdam as a ‘rainbow city’.
