Marriage

Over the past few weeks, I have seen many, many wedding banquets, wedding car processions, and it seems every banquet hall in Taipei is running at full capacity. I personally have been invited to two weddings, though was only able to make it to one. It seems that the old Chinese adage—Marry before Chinese New Year, you’ll make everyone in both families happy —is still held to be true. Out of 12 women in yesterday’s class, at least 8 wanted to marry at some point in (near) the future.

However, with education, independence, and self-reliance levels of women rising, women are marrying later and later. Fifty years ago, women married in late teens or early 20s. Thirty years ago, women were marrying in their mid-to-late 20s. Today, many women aren’t marrying until 30 or later. The trend is to marry later and have fewer children, but in yesterday’s class at least half of the women who want children wanted two. Taipei’s government is offering a cash incentive for families to have three or more children, showing the real lack of population growth and graying of Taiwan’s population.

Marriage in Taiwan is more than just the union of the husband and wife, but the joining of two families. As we discussed what people thought were important characteristics or priorities about characteristics, we learned that one important consideration when deciding whether to marry or not was how well the bride and groom-to-be got along with each other’s families. In the US, though this is important, it is not usually one of the more important priorities. We discussed the 50 most important Marriage Similarities from Neil Clark Warren’s Finding the Love of Your Life.

More discussion revolved around finding the right person to marry, in the case of the class yesterday, that would be finding the right man. Most agreed that the idea of the ‘perfect’ man is flawed. Also, the idea that one can change their man to become a better person was discussed and agreed that one changes only when one is ready. The same goes for deciding when to marry. We also discussed the problem of expectations, and how having unreal expectations may lead to disappointment and eventually can cause a relationship to die.

We also discussed the costs of engagement rings (around US$4,000) and wedding rings (around US$1000 each) and the actual wedding costs (from US$15,000~$30,000+). We also touched on different types of weddings including the ‘Vegas Wedding’. In addition we touched on the wedding obsession quiz on the Cosmopolitan website.