How Does Marriage Inform Intergenerational Ties? Reconceiving Relationships through Financial Allocations

Economic activities are indicative of the social relations we maintain with one another (Bandelj 2020; Zelizer 2012), including intimate relationships. The monetary practices, resource allocation, and financial transfers hence could reflect and embody how we conceive and calibrate marital and intergenerational ties. Literature on monetary practices primarily focuses on how social class, relative resources, gender attitudes, and macro-level institutional factors affect the management system couples adopt. Research on intergenerational transfer investigates its nature, motivation, and content often in the context of wealth and privilege reproduction. Yet, few studies have examined how economic activities in marriage and parent-child dyads reciprocally inform these two sets of relationships, both in terms of their respective boundaries and meanings. Drawing on interviews with middle-class and educated Taiwanese couples (22 couples, 3 married individuals) who are in their mid-thirties, I have found relational work that foregrounds economic activities to be a learned skill among spouses that are situated in these two distinctive relationships. Through constant referencing and differentiation, married couples when managing their finances are also prompted to revisit and reassess their emotional and financial ties with their parents. These reciprocal evaluations—gauging parental ties based on couple-dyadic transactions—have led to an assertive demarcation between blood/biological ties and conjugal unions for couples in their early family formation. This paper contributes to our understanding of the relationship between marriage and intergenerational ties from a financial perspective. It also underscores how the conceptualization of marital relationships in developed East Asia has shown individualistic tendencies while accounting for their potential dissolution.