According to media reports, a quarrel between a young couple, both single children, over whether they should visit the husband's or the wife's hometown during Spring Festival led to a divorce recently. The couple, based in Changchun, Jilin province, were married just six months ago. Perhaps the couple should have invited both sets of parents to their home, which they had moved into recently, instead of taking the extreme step, says an article in Yanzhao Evening News. Excerpts:

Since the divorced couple's hometowns are thousands of kilometers apart (Urumqi in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and Guangdong province), they possibly could not have visited both during the short Spring Festival holiday. But they could have invited both sets of parents to their new home in Changchun to celebrate the Lunar New Year. That would have been a real family reunion.

Perhaps the real problem with the divorced couple is that they both are single children of their parents. Hence, they didn't want their parents to feel neglected. In such situations, couples need reverse thinking to avoid terrible fights and enjoy a real family reunion.

Such conflicts, however, are just a small part of the problems faced by young couples. Being an only child, such couples have to take care of their elderly parents, which demands money, energy and time. Therefore, if both sets of parents can join their children for a family reunion, it would save all of them a lot of unnecessary trouble.

There are millions of couples who are single children, and the Changchun case is an early warning of the problems they will face in their conjugal life. They have to find ways to overcome these problems to live a healthy and happy life. And the government should implement favorable policies for senior citizens to provide them pension funds, accessible medical treatment and affordable houses to ease the burden of young couples.

(China Daily 01/29/2013 page9)