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Marriage a matter of cost and benefit?
By Tseng Tan |
July 26, 2012, Thursday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
A REPORT on July 10 in the Shanghai Daily reported of a class that claimed to teach women how to marry multimillionaires and costs more than 10,000 yuan (US$1,568). Various techniques, successfully proven personally, were proposed by a middle-age lecturer.
Yet in traditional Chinese society, marriage was considered an event made in heaven. The ubiquitous matchmaker would undertake the matching of ba zi (eight characters or four pillars of destiny). The Four Pillars of Destiny is a Chinese and Japanese conceptual term that describes the four components creating a person's destiny or fate. The four components within the moment of birth are year, month, day, and hour.
If the elements are complementary, the marriage could go ahead and if potential conflicts are likely, avoidance measures, in the form of rites, have to be taken.
This will ensure that the marriage will last forever - bai tou xie lao (live to ripe old age in marriage bliss).
Propinquity and similarity also count for a successful marriage.
However, there's another situation. I was at my sister's place last week and she remarked that her neighbor whom we had always regarded as a confirmed bachelor is now married.
Eddy Yuen, approaching 50 years of age and a professional school teacher is now married to a 25 year old Vietnamese lady. He met her on a trip to Vietnam, which we inferred was a marriage scouting trip.
For him, it is the last chance to find a soul mate and a companion for the next 25 years or so. For her, it is the opportunity to lift herself out of poverty and ensure better economic opportunities for her parents, and siblings.
Sociologists have turned this kind of relationship into an economic model of cost and benefit analysis and found that married couples do take into consideration the costs and benefits analysis.
But, for long term marriage, there should always be the presence of love.
Yet in traditional Chinese society, marriage was considered an event made in heaven. The ubiquitous matchmaker would undertake the matching of ba zi (eight characters or four pillars of destiny). The Four Pillars of Destiny is a Chinese and Japanese conceptual term that describes the four components creating a person's destiny or fate. The four components within the moment of birth are year, month, day, and hour.
If the elements are complementary, the marriage could go ahead and if potential conflicts are likely, avoidance measures, in the form of rites, have to be taken.
This will ensure that the marriage will last forever - bai tou xie lao (live to ripe old age in marriage bliss).
Propinquity and similarity also count for a successful marriage.
However, there's another situation. I was at my sister's place last week and she remarked that her neighbor whom we had always regarded as a confirmed bachelor is now married.
Eddy Yuen, approaching 50 years of age and a professional school teacher is now married to a 25 year old Vietnamese lady. He met her on a trip to Vietnam, which we inferred was a marriage scouting trip.
For him, it is the last chance to find a soul mate and a companion for the next 25 years or so. For her, it is the opportunity to lift herself out of poverty and ensure better economic opportunities for her parents, and siblings.
Sociologists have turned this kind of relationship into an economic model of cost and benefit analysis and found that married couples do take into consideration the costs and benefits analysis.
But, for long term marriage, there should always be the presence of love.
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