South Korea dating retreat: Can monks help 24 singles find love at a Buddhist temple?

Kim Ah-kyung, who goes by her Buddhist name, Sunhyeji, is one of the first to arrive.

The bubbly 28-year-old sits on the porch of a bungalow at the temple complex and says hello to the other women, who start trickling into the room.

They have all made it through an incredibly competitive selection process, involving questionnaires and selfie videos to assess how serious they are about marriage and kids. They beat more than 1,580 others to be at this retreat, which was open to everyone, irrespective of faith.

Sunhyeji struggled to meet a suitable partner after leaving the Seoul region for an office job in the south-eastern provinces.

“There’s really no chance to meet men,” she says. “I only go between work and home. I don’t have a hobby. I tried to get one but they were all one-on-one activities.” At her office, she adds, everyone is much older.

Dating can be hard in South Korea.

People typically meet romantic partners through school, work or sogaeting: blind dates set up by friends or family. Failing that, small talk in big cities is rare. Drinking is down. Dating apps never really took off. In 2015, after years of stagnant growth, Tinder started marketing itself as a friend-finding app to better appeal to young people.

Kwon Seung-oh, 30, who goes by Enyo, has always been put off by the idea of meeting a stranger online.

His friends put him on blind dates about 10 times, but he found them all to be shallow interactions that never went anywhere. And 97% of his co-workers at a big dairy factory outside Daegu city are men.

So now, he too finds himself at Donghwasa.