On April 1 it will be 25 years since the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage and since then 36,000 couples have tied the knot, according to new figures from the national statistics agency CBS.

By the start of this year, the Netherlands had 25,000 married same-sex couples – almost 12,000 men and 13,000 women. Of them, 600 male couples and 500 female couples were among those to get married in the first year of legalisation.

Men were on average aged 41 when they got married while women and mixed-sex couples had an average age of 37.

Every year some 400 same-sex marriages end and women are almost twice as likely to get divorced as men. Of the women who married in 2015, 24% were divorced 10 years later, compared with 13% of male couples and mixed couples.

Most same-sex married couples live in Amsterdam, Nijmegen and Groningen.

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An increasing number of same-sex couples are also parents, the CBS said. Some 9,000 female and almost 1,000 male couples have at least one child living at home.

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.