In the states, living with your parents much past the age of 20 is a warning sign that something is not quite right financially or mentally. Here, that is not so much the case and it’s one of the hardest things for me to adjust to. Where do you live is one of my first questions for a new acquaintance and ‘I live with my parents’ is not an uncommon response. It is not a warning sign for anything. It just means that they are unmarried.
I spent Saturday afternoon with a friend who is described by the title of this post. I had her over for dinner in January and she kept telling me that she wanted to return the favor. I didn’t quite realize that she was so slow to reciprocate because she was waiting for a time when her parents would be out. She doesn’t like to invite people over when her parents are there because her aging mother feels obligated to be a good hostess, cooking for the guests.
I love my parents, but I am very happy that social norms and financial concerns do not require me to live with them until I marry.
1 Comments:
At 9:33 AM,
Anonymous said…
It's not a social norm, at least not in the urban areas, but an economic issue. I guess there are people that choose to live with their parents, while being able to afford a place of their own, but I can't see them doing it because they are still single.
Note that real-estate prices (especially in Belgrade) are way beyond what most people earn. The rest of Serbia is significantly cheaper, but with a much narrower selection of well paying jobs, so it's about the same it terms of how difficult it is to have a place of your own.
Renting a flat, while common solution in the west, is a *major* pain here - primarily because most landlords (if you can call them landlords, 99.999% of them are not registered as such, nor do they pay taxes) are, simply put, greedy monsters, bent on living in luxury from the rent they collect for some shanty room 15 km from the city centre. To add to that, since everything is done in a semi-illegal manner, you have absolutely no protection, should your "landlord" decide to kick you out, or increase the rent, or whatever.
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