Better times: Athlete Liu Xiang and actress Ge Tian holding hands and posing together for the camera. They divorced on June 26, 2015. (Photo : www.szdaily.com)
When the love is gone, what happens next?
Divorce rate has been steadily increasing in the country that in the sub-provincial city of Guangzhou alone, those filing for divorce can only do so next month.
The city’s marriage registration offices are swamped with divorce applications. One office director who requested for anonymity told Women of China that despite all the personnel in their office “operating in full capacity,” the overwhelming number of applications renders them “seriously understaffed.”
Office personnel do not only attend every day to people filing for a divorce but also to those applying for a certificate to prove their single status and to others who are getting married. The number of daily applicants for single status and marriage certificates is normally between 100 and 300.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs said that only last year, 3.64 million got divorced with more than 55,000 based in Beijing. In 2013, there were 3.5 million divorce cases filed.
Ireland’s online news magazine Village reported that 2.87 million couples got divorced in 2012, as revealed in a survey by lifestyle magazine Xiaokang and Beijing’s Tsinghua University. IBTimes said that based on the said survey, infidelity was the number one reason why couples split for good.
GBTimes said that more than 43,000 couples whose marriage ended up in divorce in 2012 were from Shanghai. The ministry launched in Shanghai in 2013 the non-profit Family Harmony Project, which trains people to become effective marriage counsellors to aid couples whose marriage is on the rocks.
Couples who decided to permanently and legally cut ties from each other but still desired to uphold their responsibilities as parents only filed for divorce after their child finished taking up the National Higher Education Entrance Examination or gaokao. That primarily explains why applications for divorce suddenly soar beginning June until September.
In one case, the Beijing Morning Post reported that there is this divorced couple in Wuhan in Hubei Province who agreed to meet every weekend and pretended that everything between them was fine for the sake of their daughter who comes home every weekend from her boarding house. The daughter was informed about the divorce only after her exam.
Domestic violence is also a cause of divorce, and sometimes the child witnesses it and might even be the one to ask the aggrieved parent to file for divorce. Such was the case of a 45-year-old teacher. Beijing Morning Post said that after her daughter saw her tied up one day, she finally disclosed to her that her father is a drug user and was the one who did it.
Social media also takes the blame. Apparently, if couples spend more time chatting with someone else than spending quality time with their respective partners, cracks tend to appear in the relationship and sooner or later, it shatters.
Couples get married presumably out of love. When that love is gone, divorce is sometimes what happens next.
