<p>I happen to read this article on the Internet. It seems the wedding is even more complicated across the biggest pond on the Earth from our continent.</p>
<p>According to the “standard requirement” there, we are doomed because we have not been able to buy a house for our son. (We used to have a neighbor who was from S. Korea. They said to us several times that they were going to buy a house for their son, 5 yo then, and we did not understand why. Now I understand why after reading this article. Without a house purchased for the groom before marriage (or at least have saved enough money for leasing a house for 2 years), how can the bride’s family furnish the house?)</p>
<p>The anguish over choosing the right wedding gifts, though perhaps most intense among the wealthy, is shared by all social classes, Kim said.</p>
<p>“A woman from a poor family may have to work and save for her marriage, instead of relying on her family, but she will face similar problems over gifts,” Kim said.</p>
<p>What underlies the gift exchanges is that, despite South Korea’s high-tech exterior, marriages are still unions between families, and parents remain deeply involved in the final selection of their children’s spouses.</p>
<p>“Marriage is a whole family thing,” said Lee Hyo Yon, 28, an official at the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency who married recently. “And gifts are such an important part of it that some couples even break up before they ever get married. The family of one friend of mine gave $30,000 to the bridegroom’s family, but they said that wasn’t enough.”</p>
<p>Lee said she was lucky because the family of her husband, Kim Young Seok, an engineer at Hyundai Motors, was extremely easygoing.
…
The young couple will live with the bridegroom’s parents for the time being. But his parents have already bought an apartment for their son and his future wife. “We’re three brothers in my family,” Kim said. “So my parents bought each son an apartment years ago for their future marriages.”</p>
<p>As for Lee, she is bringing over a new king-sized bed. Unlike many other mothers-in-law, hers was not interested in receiving any gifts.</p>
<p>“That in itself caused my mother and me to worry,” said Lee, who earned a master’s degree in management from New York University. “Maybe we really weren’t doing enough. One day we even took my future mother-in-law to a fur coat store and asked her to let us choose one for her. But she refused.”</p>
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