In my second article on Poverty and Problems, I will write about a topic that is perhaps quite surprising to many people: Family. Many of us have seen articles or news programs reporting on broken marriages of politicians, rich billionaires, or celebrities in newspapers or on television. This makes many people mistakenly think that it will be easier to divorce when we are rich.
This is quite understandable. When people are rich, people tend to be pickier about the standards for their spouses. To put it simply, when they just saw someone (who they thought was) better, prettier, or more suitable for them than their current partner, they could afford to divorce and get married to another person. We can see articles about a certain billionaire or rich millionaire divorcing his 50-year-old wife to marry a beautiful young woman in her 20s every day.
Being rich makes people busier; they spend more time working, earning money, or even playing and shopping than spending time with their family. This is why family members often do not understand each other and have distance from each other, easily leading to conflicts in daily life. This makes the divorce rate among wealthy couples often higher than in other social classes.
However, does this mean that poverty will make people love each other more and not divorce? Unfortunately, the answer is no. In fact, the divorce rate of the poor is much higher than that of the rich. And in contrast to the rich, the causes of marriage breakdowns for the poor are often much worse. The poor often divorce only when they have reached the end of the road.
The cause of divorce that we most often see in poor couples is because they want to find a partner with better conditions to earn a living. They haven’t even taken care of the food to eat, the clothes to wear, the house to live in, so they don’t have enough time to take care of themselves, their spouse, or care enough about the thing called love. They can’t stand a life without food and clothing and worry about financial problems. Many wives accepted a divorce to marry a man (if they were lucky) with better conditions or (if they were unlucky) to be mistresses of already married people. They did not want a divorce but left their husband and children away.
This leads to another important issue: suitable alliance (similarity of social background between bride and bridegroom’s families). This is considered an old-fashioned concept when parents and families ask the bride or groom to marry someone with similar economic conditions to their home. However, in today’s society, there are more and more marriages between the rich and the poor. Even so, this is not as nice as many people think. The different economic conditions between husband and wife create different thoughts and lifestyles in everyday life. This leads to quarrels in life and makes these marriages not last long.
However, sometimes divorce is not a bad thing because many poor families are suffering even worse things in marriage and family life: domestic violence. (Often) poor and incompetent men who return home after admitting defeat in society will find a sense of superiority over others by venting their anger on their wives and children with whipping. And because the wives understand that if they divorce, they will have nothing left, not be able to raise children, and not even earn a living. Therefore, they have no choice but to endure the beatings of their violent husbands.
Financial conditions and money play more roles in our lives than we think. Happiness is determined by emotions and people but is built on the foundation of money. In the old days, people thought that just “a hut with two golden hearts” was enough so that they could live happily together for the rest of their lives. However, modern life does not allow us to do that when we have too many things to worry about: our parents need money for medical care, our children need money for school fees, our families need money to buy a house, etc.
It’s not enough for us to love each other. We need to be responsible and brave enough to take care of the people we love. Therefore, we must prepare ourselves with the best possible knowledge base to get a good job with a stable salary. Only then can we have a happy, full life next to the people we love.
At Project Sprouts, we realize that we can not solve all the problems of poverty in a situation like this. But we can seek to make a difference in the lives of needy children by giving them school supplies and encouraging them to continue their education; we can give them winter coats, boots, and blankets to help them stay warm during the cold winter months.
Project Sprouts would love to have you be a part of our community and help us help worthy children in North Vietnam. We cannot solve all the world’s problems, but we can do our part to help poor kids grow by giving school supplies, winter coats, boots, and other supplies.
You can find out more about Project Sprouts by clicking here or going to our give now page to donate by clicking here. As we are a grassroots organization, all funds go to help those in need.
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