"They can skip their first divorce".... Very funny.

Which brings me to a tangent that a poster mentioned a few months ago (Fifi, maybe?): How can young "normal" people in America, who are all the time exposed to stats about the high rate of divorce (60% of couples divorce within 3 years - everybody knows that) and whose parents, teachers and friends are divorced, but still max out their credit cards to pay (with their parents) $50,000 for a fairy tale wedding. And then they borrow to buy furniture and for the down payment on the house, KNOWING - or they should know - that the odds of them divorcing within 3 years are 60%. Those fairy tale weddings (with the $10K princess wedding dress and the castle covered with roses in the background) are just that: A fairy tale: Marriage does not make you happy ever after.

Of course the wedding industry is a powerful mythology generator. Same for the fashion shows and magazines. And mostly the education that baby girls start getting as soon as they are born: They are right away dressed in pink and soon their toys are dolls and doll houses. We understand all that programming. But we have to realize that the young Chinese who still believe 100% in marriage (because their parents do, as you wrote) are not too far away in terms of naivety from our American kids (even big tough kids like the Marines who go kill overseas as much as they like, fall for that, head first).

My feeling is that it will take another full generation in America for people to fully start realizing that marriage is an outdated institution. If conservatives stay in power 8 years, make that two generations. But in China, it might take as much as 3 generations. What is your prognostic?