Marriage - Part Two

In this post, I will talk a little bit about marriage gifts before going into marrying "elites" in Korea.

In Korea, marriage is more of a union of families than a union of two people.  There's a lot of process involved in marrying families, it seems.  Korean families make material preparations and exchange marriage "goods" when their children get married.  Many cultures have something similar, I'm sure, but the Korean way is way too complex for me to understand the details.  Simply put, groom's family prepares the home for the couple to live in, the bride's family fills the home with furnishings and the families exchange cash, jewellery, silken goods and other "marriage" items.  Families come to agreements on these items before the couple marries.  I can't imagine the parents sitting down and negotiate on them. 

When I was working in the patent department of our company, I've been told that I should study and take the patent bar to become a patent lawyer... so that I can marry well.  I like the idea of "marrying well" (whatever that means), but I'm not gonna take the wrong career path for me to do so.  "Patent lawyer" in Korean is "byeollisa".  In Korea, some of the top professions end in a single Korean letter pronounced "sa".  Doctor - Euisa.  Lawyer - Byunhosa.  Judge - Pahnsa.  If a girl wants to get married to a "sa", she needs to be hot, for one, and her parents have to fork up a lot money.  Usually, the parents of the girl has to pay for the couple's house, a doctor's office and car for the son and buy loads of shit for the groom's family.  I've heard of marriages become unrealized solely because the guy's parents demanded too much materialistic goods from the girl's family and the girl's parents couldn't afford it or refused.

The way I see it, the parents of the "sa" is SELLING their son, trying to get some return on their investment.  It's sad, in my point-of-view, but some say it makes sense.  It's even sadder than some families willingly pay up that much money and send their daughters off thinking that they've gotten a good deal.

"sa" is definitely in high demand among women but there are also professions for women that men prefers.  Teachers are popular because the profession is directly related to the education of children.  Flight attendants are also very popular, because I think the women have to be physically attractive to start with and the profession demands high quality of service which husbands desire from their wife-to-be's.

Some professions rise to the status of "elites" if they ride the trends to be come popular.  In the recent years, fund managers were in top demand because they became lucrative careers during the economic rise after early 2000s, but I'm sure that that popularity took a massive hit due to the global financial crisis.