There are different stages to engagement and marriage here . It’s probably due to the fact that weddings are often a family affair and that many families negotiate about 聘金 bride price and what assets they may give to the couple upon marriage. They may walk away if they can’t agree on these details.
Also bride’s family should pay engagement ceremony cost.
The engagement party is when the engagement is made ‘official’.
Believe me this is still very much a thing in Taiwan. Also don’t think that the daughters don’t want this…They usually want the 聘金 but often the parents of the bride take it all. Sell off the daughter so to speak.
it’s not much about relationships, but more about custom.
My wife and I married in the UK. However, when we moved to Taiwan we had a Taiwanese wedding to keep family happy. We were both busy so we had the engagement party the day before the wedding reception.
It was made clear that the engagement party wasn’t optional. It needed to get done.
why make things simple, if you can make it complicated?
And how is this defined? What steps do you have to take, legally speaking, in order to be “engaged”?
I’m not sure the Mrs. and I were ever “engaged” in this ceremonial sense–we went straight from being boyfriend / girlfriend, to being married (and I think this is common). This was pre-2008, so we had our wedding banquet and honeymoon before filling out any forms at city hall. (I asked what would happen if I refused to sign after the honeymoon, and was told that the witnesses to the banquet would attest to the wedding.) My parents in law didn’t ask for a bride-price, either from me or from anyone else who married into the family (although the in-laws of one of their daughters insisted on bringing literally boxes of cash to the wedding in order to be photographed with it!). They’re not wealthy, by any means, but they do have their pride. Cookies, however, were a must.
Traditionally there’s a separate engagement party (banquet), but it is not necessary to be in an enagement.
According to law, all you have to do is for the two people to enter an verbal agreement to get married. So one would need to prove that both party had willingly entered such an agreement. That can usually be proven with expenses spent towards that goal, and to get the other party to pay for the money lost.
Idk if it’s just my family or what, but we really don’t follow these old traditions. We do the basics like tomb sweeping and honor any wishes for someone who was Buddhist,Taoist, etc when they pass away. Did you guys who married into Taiwanese families really have to deal with all of this money giving, multiple events and stuff? Had no idea many people still do this, thought it was just in the movies.
There is a engagment ceremony to take back old the hong bao the family of your girlfriend give to other people. They explain me to me like that, all about money
I’ve never done tomb sweeping. My wife doesn’t do it either.
City folk :).
A lot of these traditions are still seen as important and observed in Taiwan. I’ve done the tomb sweeping, seen multiple different engagements and marriages with gold involved, the hong baos with amounts carefully noted etc etc. Common. Dentists and doctors paying pingjin of millions of NTD sometimes (but usually ifs a lot less than that…Maybe few hundred thousand NTD).
You simply couldn’t get the girl in many places if you didn’t go along with some of it. By the way, as the other poster said, parents of the engaged couple will often push for a large number of invitees to weddings and engagements because they want to get some hongbaos back after giving them out over decades in some cases ! That’s a lot of money. It’s a cultural thing that’s a bit messed up, because even if you didn’t want to ask for hongbaos you’ve probably given away tonnes over the years…and will be asked in future too.
My solution to not doing anything I don’t want. “I’m not in Taiwan right now or whenever that event is”
I’ve never done tomb-sweeping, but that’s because the in-laws don’t have any tombs to sweep. I have accompanied them to a Buddhist temple to do bai-bai during that holiday, though. (An uncle’s ashes are stored in an urn there.)
For our wedding, we had a matchmaker appointed (even though we obviously already knew each other) and did a kind of ceremony where she served tea to my relatives. At some point we bowed to her parents, and to the family altar (to notify them that a daughter of the family was being transferred to another house), then her mother threw out a quantity of water (to symbolize that the daughter, like the water, should not come back) as we got in the car and drove…a block or two down the street, where our house is. The matchmaker and others turned up there and did some more rituals, such as sticking little “double-happiness” stickers on all the walls in each of the four cardinal directions.
I’m going to make up a bunch of rituals for Lilith to do lol.
You totally can! Make her bow to an image of Bob Dobbs or something. I tried to convince my relatives (on both sides) that the other side insisted on nudism, but they didn’t buy it.
Totally true story. This morning I had my students ask each other what they did and where they went during the Spring break. Afterwards I asked a lad what he had done and he replied “I go Tainan bai-bai.”
I was really excited that someone had done something interesting and pressed for more information. “Really! How long did it take you?”
Confusion reigned until I asked “Who did you cycle with?”.
It then became clear.