From the beginning to the end of the Marriage, and even after the divorce, every step of the way, there are people in which become more “poor”. Poverty due to marriage is not necessarily the point of being “out of the Family” or “But the decline in living standards is real.
1
A month before the wedding, Zhang Yuzhe went to his fiancée’s house for dinner, his mother-in-law asked at the table from the family’s recent situation to the plan after the wedding, the topic finally came around to the bride price.
Since his brother’s wedding two years ago, his Parents gave out 100,000 in bride price, and the money saved by the elderly was barely enough to give him a wedding. His mother-in-law asked for a bride price of 80,000, and he hoped his fiancée would understand his difficulties, but he was too embarrassed to ask for it, as the figure was not high in the area.
The wedding and wedding banquet was held in a hotel in the county some years ago, compared to the new, luxuriously decorated new hotels that have opened in the center of the county in the past few years, this hotel’s consumption level can still let him afford. The two families agreed to receive their own gift, the money for the banquet Zhang Yuzhe family to pay. The night before the wedding, he and his parents sat in the living room, roasting fire, turned out the family’s favor book, a rough calculation, the gift can be recovered 100,000 to 100,000, plus his own part-Time job to save 30,000 to 40,000, should be enough to pay the wedding costs and bride money.
Since there were too many relatives in his wife’s family, the banquet was increased to 11 tables. During the toast, he unconsciously calculated that the banquet alone would cost 26,000 yuan more than originally planned.
The wedding received 110,000 in gift money eventually all hitched into the wedding, there is no little left. He couldn’t bear the thought of his parents borrowing money again, so he borrowed 50,000 yuan from his high school classmates for the sake of the promised bride price and the need for money to start a business.
The wedding was just the beginning, a boy from a county in Hunan saw his friend spend 300,000 on the wedding banquet, he could not understand, even if all the friends and relatives to eat a meal to so much money? Other friends to him “science”, the wedding banquet is not just a meal thing, the accompanying gifts, invitations, planning, wedding decorations, hotels and venues, everything costs money. He still thinks it’s ridiculous, “300,000, two people can travel around the world.
A guy in Beijing confessed that he especially avoided calculating the wedding account. The bride price and the cost of inviting friends and relatives are nothing, but the price of housing is really out of the question. With a monthly salary of just over 10,000 yuan, buying a house is impossible. According to the model of most people of the same age, the family after the down payment, their own monthly payments, which is still a “huge amount”, not married before, they can still live at Home, even the rent are can save. So getting married, for him, may be to embark on the “road to poverty”.
2
More ordinary people’s marriages do not suffer from the pain and tear brought by the bride price, but the decline in material living standards brought about by marriage is hidden in various details of Life.
There is no buffer period, nor any psychological preparation, into the marriage, Zhang Ziyun work for eight years to save 100,000 yuan quickly scattered, buy a house, decoration, buy furniture to make their own hemorrhage, husband’s savings are not left.
This is followed by a variety of post-marital favors, the wedding when their own gifts to cover the cost of the wedding, the first year after the wedding, in time for the marriage of cousins, did not arrive in the gift money to be returned. Because of the marriage to the northeast, travel expenses back home also became an additional cost, the month of the cousin’s wedding, counting the gift and airfare, she spent a large part of her salary.
In the end, the house was a major task in her life, and she was more comfortable, but the expenses never stopped after the wedding, making the sense of crisis has been weighing on her. For several years after the wedding, she felt that she “could not get over it”, not to mention the possibility of regaining the previous state of life.
Consumption naturally fell off a cliff, and she used to use cosmetics like Estee Lauder, but now her makeup cabinet is almost full of “affordable alternatives”. She began to do what she would never do before: rubbing a chair in a milk tea store to rest her feet, but not ordering a cup of milk tea. She hardly buys clothes anymore, and has two sets of clothes a year that she can wear out.
Guo Xing’er used to be addicted to all kinds of literary life, going to the cinema twice a week, various film festivals, art exhibitions, and the new creative products of her favorite bookstore. At the end of the previous year, she looked at the annual summary of Douban and saw that the number of movies she had marked had dropped to 17 from more than 300 in the previous two years.
Both parents and the couple got along quickly in the year after the wedding. Her mother-in-law used to be unwell and never bothered her son at work, but once after the wedding, she took her mother-in-law to the hospital with her for a headache, which could not be reimbursed as an outpatient, and the cost of tests and Medicine was a big expense. Her own parents also began to think about the future, one night on the phone, talking about the recent good piece of cemetery, she took the initiative to play over tens of thousands of dollars.
The reckless life of a teenager when “one person is full and the whole family is not hungry” is gone. She realized that the biggest change after marriage was that she was no longer treated as a child, and that the responsibilities of a daughter, wife and daughter-in-law had come to her at the same time during the year.
3
Unlike Zhang Ziyun, who peered into the changing family relationships to find the financial relationships in her marriage, it was only when Zhang Wen was headed for divorce that she realized from the divorce papers, which were filled with property rights and obligations, that she had perhaps simply overlooked what marriage really meant.
Zhang Wen’s marriage ended with an 18-page divorce agreement. This highly educated woman, who studied in the United States and always remembered to be a modern independent woman, entered the marriage with a longing. But marriage was far more complicated than she thought.
The marriage didn’t last long. Unable to tolerate widowhood parenting and tired of balancing her doctorate and motherhood, she sat in class on painkillers for 2 months after giving birth until the pain was numb.
But these labors could not be seen. On the other hand, even if her husband does not contribute a single bit of household and childcare work, he is entitled to half of all the money he earns. If he passes away suddenly, his pension, life insurance, accident insurance and many other insurance policies, all of them are his. And the longer the marriage lasts, the more grounds he will have to claim spousal support in the event of a divorce. In the divorce agreement, she discharged each of these.
What Zhang Wen experienced as a result of her marriage was more like a form of invisible poverty, because it did not involve the division of property or the division of family savings, neither of them lost anything and no one profited from it. However, after the marriage, she was not so comfortable with her own finances. She and her husband agreed that family expenses would be amortized at a ratio of 40% and 60%, and that the 10% less she contributed was because it was included in the cost of childbirth. In the first few years, her PhD scholarship was enough to support her, but in the later years, after she had a child, she started to struggle financially with the stress of childcare and the pressure of graduating from her PhD, and she had to borrow money to pay for her living expenses.
If this marriage has taught her anything, she feels it is “some lessons”.
Divorce lawyer Wu Jiezhen once concluded in an interview with the Daily Beast that although women are now socially independent, there is a “male-dominated, female-dominated” cultural inertia when it comes to marriage. “cultural inertia, coupled with the objective conditions of childbirth, it is easy to return to the mode of the default sacrifice of women, and become a passive role.
4
Money plays an important role in sustaining or destroying a marriage. In addition to love and romance, marriage is also full of economic considerations.
Property questions come from different young people entering marriage, but they are so similar: How do you sign your name to the house? How to pay the mortgage? Whose property does the bride price belong to, and should it be returned in case of divorce?
The economic competition sometimes reaches a crazy level. Lawyer Zhang Jing has come across a large number of marriage samples in her past legal consulting work. She has seen a couple to sign a prenuptial property agreement, the boy proposed that the family house should be counted as prenuptial property, regardless of the future income generated, the man owns. The girl then proposed that her parents’ two suites would have nothing to do with the man when he inherited them in the future. In the end, even the extra 10,000 yuan in wages should be excluded from the common property, the two did not see eye to eye.
This kind of calculation will continue even after the dissolution of the marriage. After Zhang Wen’s divorce, only a 14% child support payment was stipulated because her husband was not yet working full time. She sent her husband monthly bills that actually didn’t amount to much at all. Sometimes the 14% on a small item was only a few dollars, and her husband insisted on seeing proof of payment and even asked her to prove that the money had actually been spent on the child. She couldn’t stand these financial cheap entanglements and now doesn’t send bills anymore and raises her children on her own.
When we fell in love, no one ever thought that marriage would lead to a “return to poverty”. But the truth is, from the beginning to the end of the marriage, and even after the divorce, each step may be in which someone becomes more “poor”.
“Poorer”, perhaps for some people, is also the price of maintaining a marriage relationship. Zhang Ziyun and her husband understand each other’s financial pressures and have learned to make the necessary compromises.
She bought a small house of more than 70 square meters before marriage. She wanted to use the big one as a bedroom, and the small one as a checkroom, full of her favorite clothes and bags. In the summer, she came back to live, as a vacation.
But in the end, the house could only be renovated into an extremely ordinary two-room apartment. She and her husband had little to no recreational life and really no extra money to pay the monthly payments on the small house. The couple, who had been married for three years, agreed – and ruthlessly rented it out.
From the day of the wedding, the pressure of “not being able to slow down” has been plaguing Zhang Ziyun. Now, she can only hope that when the children grow up, she may be able to free herself.
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