How Do We View Marriage
2016-02-14
Just a few days ago, a piece of news has sparked heated dispute on the Internet. It is said that a girl from the metropolitan city Shanghai went to his boyfriend's hometown located in rural areas of Jiangxi Province. However, the girl was consternated by the crude Spring Festival Eve dinner and the shabby housing conditions and then posted the images onto the internet for complaint. Agitated by some netizens, she hesitated and decided to go back to home next day. In the case above, while some people say the girl is lack of civility because it is after all such an important festival for Chinese, some argue it is wise for the girl to break up with her boyfriend since marriage is so realistic that she will have to live in agony if she marries a man with a poor background. From my perspective, it reflects the predicament of Chinese marriage and a clash between young and old.
In some Chinese people's eyes, love is one thing, but marriage is another. Interestingly, Chinese parents usually object their children's puppy love in high schools, but urge them to get married after they graduated from college. And there will be gossips from the neighbours and pressure from parents for those leftover women and men, especially in underdeveloped cities and countryside. It is a shame not to get married in one's thirties or so, according to the social convention. Moreover, in the view of some elder people, the only thing that a female seeks is to marry a good husband.
Besides, in China, marriage is never a personal issue for the two involved but for two families. And the parents-in-law will list a variety of lists for the future son-in-law such as income, estate, cars and so forth. Unfortunately, we all judge, and we are clannish about marriage. Perhaps it does not belong to Chinese but is part of human nature as well. As Jane Austin wrote in her book Pride and Prejudice, "However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters." But how can a couple settles for a marriage with little spiritual fulfillment? Does a marriage based on fortune or arrangement will last longer and be more happy?
In Qian Zhongshu's novel Fortress Besieged, he compared marriage to a bastion beleaguered where people outside want to get in and people inside want to get out. Throughout human history, such an incessant loop of "in and out" unfolds the anthropic tales of seeking for love, fortune, status and reproduction, via the union of a couple and two clans at an appropriate time and sometimes breaking up in the days to come because of a variety of reasons. We affirm the necessity of marriage as if it were a principle universally acknowledged, but barely ponder its meaning behind the scenes.
marriage at its core is a social contract governed by marriage law. lawyers love that. at the end of the day, when sh*t hit fans, the contract will stipulate how the money should be divided. as a positive point, it is designed to protect the weaker party when it is over.
Comment