Love Is in the Air

It's that time of the year.  The air is getting crisp.  The leaves are turning nice autumn-y colors.  The smothering humidity is losing its grip over my happiness.  And it seems like every young couple in Nanjing is choosing this month as the time to get married.

I absolutely love how the groom is standing.

Pretty much every day I've seen the signs of at least one wedding.  The convoy of eight or so black BMWs with pink roses on the door handles.  The incessant fireworks (although that's pretty much every day in China).  And a slew of tacky wedding photo-ops.

Raise your hand if you don't mind weird foreigners taking pictures of you!

This coincided perfectly with the discussion of "divorce in China" that I had been having with a few of my classes.  The United States has a divorce rate that is...I want to say laughable.  Perhaps absurd?  Ridiculous?  Many reliable sources (a.k.a. Wikipedia) put the American divorce rate at almost 50%.  Almost half of the marriages in America end in divorce, and while the numbers are drastically different for those who marry after 26, it's still pretty depressing.

China doesn't even come close to the United States with their paltry 15%.  Seriously China, where's the spontaneity!?  We can lend you a few Las Vegas churches if that is what's holding you back.  I wanted to get to the bottom of this question, so I turned to the experts...my 183 sophomores.

It's hard to grade objectively when they turn it in on such cute paper.

The first reason that they gave was the same reason they give for every one of my "Why does China...?" questions.  China is a very traditional country.  Or.  China is a country founded on very traditional thoughts.  I get that sentence so often in the papers they write for me, I told them they could simply write CIAVTC and I would know exactly what they meant. 

The second main reason was parental control.  The Chinese society puts a heavy emphasis on the respect of one's parents.  And they don't just talk the talk.  Many of my students said that couples would simply ask their parents if they could get divorced, and the parents would forbid them from doing so.  I told them that this doesn't really happen in America.  I'm sure parents in the States have attempted to dissuade, and perhaps influenced many to not get divorced.  But I have a feeling it's not that common.

And the third was essentially what I feel to be the main contributing factor.  It has a huge social stigma.  It hasn't been accepted as a normal step in life as it has in America.  And I think as their divorce rate rises (as it does with a nation's development), it will hit a point and jump considerably higher as it stops being any bigger of a deal than a simple topic of neighborhood gossip.

I then told them my half-baked opinion regarding the high divorce rate of America (and the rest of the world).  I feel that the stipulation of "until death do us part" was written during an era in which it may not have meant as much.  The average human was living into their 40s.  Spending the rest of your life with someone wasn't nearly as big of a commitment as it is nowadays.

Stolen from HarkAVagrant.com

But in all seriousness, nothing is really to blame except the human nature to rush into things...or the assumption that if you've been happy for one year, you can be happy for 40.

Everyone should just have six-year long engagement periods.  (Love you Andrew and Naomi!)