CP #2 Turkish Family Life Before Marriage - Stephanie

Serher is from Ankara, the capital of Turkey.  She believes this is the second largest city in Turkey, with Istanbul of course, being the largest. Ankara is also the only Turkish city Serher has ever seen.  She hasn't had a need to travel outside of her hometown, though she hopes one day to visit Izmir, Istanbul and a few other places in Turkey that I can't pronounce, let alone spell correctly. :)

Back at home, Serher has everything she needs in Ankara: her job, her friends, her school, and most importantly, her family.  Like most unmarried young people inside Turkey, she lives with her parents and will continue to stay with them until she gets married.  I thought this was cool, but I was curious about why the need to stay UNTIL marriage.  I mean, it sounded like 'you had to go' when you got married, but this just made her chuckle.  "It's because you need to begin your own family" she told me.  She went on to explain that in Turkey, it's considered normal to continue to live with your family beyond school graduations and the start of your own career.  The advantage is to allow young people to save up large amounts of money before the leave to begin their own families.  Men for example, are expected to have enough money saved up to be able to buy a house and furnish it for their wife at the time of marriage.

This caused me to laugh and I had to explain how Americans are so eager to 'leave the nest' and move as far from our families as possible.  Because of this, it is little wonder how we tend to accumulate enormous amounts of personal debt and school debt by the time we get married.  I related that I know many people that had been married for 10 or 15 years before they finally finished paying off their school loans or paying off the credit card debt they accumulated in their 'wild days' living the single life at school.  This made me realize how backwards Americans actually have it, a sentiment that caused us both to laugh at the differences in our respective cultures.