Raymond Zhou

Cost of marriage: should husbands really bear the brunt of bliss?

By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-01-07 07:14

If you're a single male living in Beijing, you need to make a mental note of this figure: 1,068,000.

No, it's not the lottery payoff you dream you'll win next week. It's the number of yuan you'll need to shell out to get married, according to some savant in that eerie dimension we call the online world.

And in true journalistic panache, the report has also figured out that it's going to take you exactly 12 years to save the sum on the condition that you don't spend a penny on food, lodging or anything else.

You may wonder why I'm calling some Internet babble a "report." Well, it does sound like something fresh from the National Bureau of Statistics: It lists 31 metropolitan areas and provinces and comes with an index of "difficulties of finding a wife," which is the ratio of single male adults to single female adults.

Let's look at the breakdown of the Beijing number:

A housing unit, reasonably located between the Third Ring and the Fourth Ring roads. Average price: 8,000 yuan per square metre, or 640,000 yuan for 80 square metres.

Interior decoration: 150,000 yuan.

Furniture and home appliances: 80,000 yuan.

A car of medium price range: 120,000 yuan for a Hyundai Elantra. (No decent girl would consider public transport, the report adds.)

Wedding banquet: zero. That's based on 200 guests in a four-star hotel, with average cost of 200 yuan each, totalling 40,000. Since each guest is expected to give a red envelope of 200 yuan, that just breaks even.

Honeymoon: 30,000 yuan for a trip to Maldives Island.

Expenses for two years of dating that leads up to marriage: 48,000 yuan, which covers dining out, gifts, travel, and so on.

Altogether, it adds up to 1,068,000 yuan.

Now, like any solid consulting report, especially those unsolicited, it offers a glimmer of hope. It assumes that the guy's folks have 300,000 yuan stashed aside and will give it to him as a wedding present. On top of that, he himself is making 60,000 a year.

And as an aside, it mentions that, for this sum, you'll get only a woman that is average on whatever register he's using, i.e. college graduate, medium height, winning appearance, stable job. This is definitely not a high-maintenance trophy wife.

Obviously, whoever wrote this report has never heard of the term "fixed assets" and "amortization" because maybe he was recently zapped from the pre-reform years. But on second thought, his samples seem to have done away with buses, bikes or the metro, but live in a fantasy land reminiscent of Budweiser commercials.

I guess that's the middle-class dream, or more accurately, a dream for the middle class.

If this were reality, all Fortune 500 companies would relocate their headquarters to China within a month.

Another possible consequence: people may prolong their "friends" like cohabitation period indefinitely.

Some netizens, upon reading the posting, sighed in despair while the optimistic ones suggested marrying into rich families by turning themselves into gold diggers.

For all the hilarity of this report-forecast, there is a whiff of truth in it: there is pressure in keeping up with the Joneses in a high-growth era.

People of the older generation may feel their courtship was purer and less materialistic, but young men in the 70s needed to furnish their Spartan homes with a bike, a sewing machine and a watch which had to be Shanghai-made before the fiancs would say their wedding vows in front of a Chairman Mao portrait.

Peer pressure has been in existence any time, anywhere. But for some in China, it often evolves into elaborate rituals, especially when it comes to engagements and weddings. Customs vary from place to place, but they usually specify what items the bride and the groom should buy. With living standards improving so fast, the list gets longer and more expensive.

No offence to feminists, the financial burden usually falls on the man I don't know whether it was the result of lopsided male-female ratio, the women's liberation movement or some vestige of male-dominated tradition.

But Jane Austin would have a field day if she were living in today's China and write about the fussiness with which parents try to marry off their grownup sons instead of charming daughters who look like Kate Winslet or Keira Knightley.

To be fair, a lot of young women feel uneasy about piling up a mountain of debt for their husbands-to-be because they'd have to share the excess baggage, too. But society with its invisible rules and routines has a way to get them, and it's called "losing face."

Actually, many people I know are standing up to the social norms and making their own choices. They live within their means, and even if they do have a million bucks to squander, they'll use it as they see fit, not as dictated by some number cruncher.

E-mail: raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 01/07/2006 page4)