Marry Me, Marry My Customs

The last time Tan Xinya, native of Changde, Hunan Province, asked her newly-wed husband, a Wuhan resident, if he was prepared to buy their new home, his angry response was, "I don't care what the custom is in your ancestral home, if we're going to live in a house in Wuhan we should both pay for it."
To Tan's mind, buying the marital home is the responsibility of the groom's family. "I know it's a huge expense these days, but according to the customs I grew up with，my husband's family should buy our house and my family should furnish it," she explained. Tan has since asked her parents to share the cost of buying a house, but they are reluctant because it would mean loss of face. "If I'd married a man from my home city this would not have been a problem. But most of the husbands and wives we know of our age also come from different places," Tan said.
Marriages like Tan's, where husband and wife are registered residents of different cities or areas, are indeed becoming commonplace. 
Almost 40% of the total marriages registered in 2009 were of spouses from different regions, according to the latest Shanghai Bureau of Civil Affairs (SBCA) statistics.
But cultural differences like those arising between Tan and her husband often make for hard matrimonial going. Having seen one marriage founder over housing, Tan is keen to make peace with her husband. "My friend is from Wuhan and her now ex-husband is from Tianjin. Her mother-in-law wanted them to move back to Tianjin but she refused. After months of terrible fights they couldn't agree, so they divorced." Tan said. In efforts to avoid a similar fate, Tan is trying to convince her parents to contribute to the cost of her new home. She admits that maintaining a marriage with a spouse from a different province is not easy.
Where to spend the National Day golden week caused a serious difference of opinion between Xiaoning, from northeastern Anshan, Liaoning Province and her husband Yi Bing, from southern Hunan Province. "We fought over whose parents we should visit for the holiday," Xiao Ning said. Having lost, she spent the week in Hunan.
"Before we married，the idea of two people from different backgrounds living together seemed romantic. I know now that it's plain inconvenient," Xiaoning said.
Coming from either side of the broad north/south divide creates differences as fundamental as which staple food the happy couple should eat with their stir fry. "I grew up on wheaten foods，but Yi's staple food has always been rice," Xiaoning said. Such culinary preferences can eat away at the very foundations of a marriage.
Ms Zhu and her husband, also from different provinces, have lived in Dalian for five years. The serious matter of whose parents should come to live with them has been their bone of contention since early this year . "Our finances don't permit sharing our home with both four aging parents. As my mom is in poor health I want her and my father to come and live with us. But my husband won't agree to it," Zhu said. "I thought we had settled down to a stable life after ironing out differences over our residential origins, but the matter of supporting our aging parents has made them worse than ever."
This topical issue of mixed-province marriages was the subject of a recent joint survey by China Youth Daily Social Investigation Center, minyi.net.cn and the Sohu News Center. To the question, "What are the main difficulties of coming from different places?" 65.4% of respondents answered, "arranging family visits on holidays"; 55.3% cited the problem of caring for aging parents; 54.0% raised differences in living habits; and 50.7 % worried about the effect of different origins on their offspring's education. Only 16.5% appeared unconcerned about any of these matters.
Marriage guidance counselor Zhou Xiaopeng observed another cross-cultural marriage problem evident in the terrible argument a couple she knows had over clan rituals. The husband wanted to go to his hometown on the 15th day of the seventh lunar month for the Ghost Festival, when it is customary to burn paper money and perform other rituals for deceased family members. When his wife objected he accused her of a lack of respect for his family.
"My friend thought the trip unnecessary simply because there's no such custom at Ghost Festival where she comes from.  It's mainly celebrated in southern areas," Zhou explained.
Chengdu resident Ms Liu believes that the easiest way to avoid such problems is simply not to marry away from home. "I'm always telling my son to find wife in Chengdu. That way he wouldn't have to travel too far for family visits. He and his wife would also not need to go to the expense of buying a house big enough for either my husband and me or our in-laws," Liu said.
Marriage counselor Zhou points out that today's rapid pace of life and population flow makes finding a suitable mate harder than ever. Being picky about spouse origins narrows the choice to an impossible degree. "In earlier, more stable times we would advise young people to think ahead and try to find a spouse with a matching mindset. But things change so rapidly these days that no-one can be sure where they will be in 20 or 30 years' time. We now believe that expecting a girl in her early 20s to insist on buying a marital home big enough to accommodate her or her future husband's parents amounts to over-planning, " Zhou said.
The advice of Dr Xu Xiangjun, national psychological consultant and director of Dalian Psychological Studio, to cross-province husbands and wives is, "If you want a happy family, try to see matters from your partner's perspective. You should accentuate the positive aspects of your marriage by focusing on one another's attributes."