RM70,000 in angpow money stolen from wedding

Wedding reception turns sour for newly-weds as their wedding Angpow box goes missing.Filepic

KUALA LUMPUR: A sweet Valentine’s wedding reception turned sour for newly-weds, Cia Cen Lim and Rachel Sim.

The couple had been greeting guests at Sutera Pekin restaurant, Johor Bahru at 7.50pm when they realised their wedding Angpow Box, containing some RM70,000 had gone missing.

“The money box was at the counter guarded by my sister and her boyfriend who were there for hours,” said Cia.

He said it was stolen when his sister’s boyfriend left the counter for a few seconds to attend to a guest. Cia claimed, his sister meanwhile had been distracted by one of the suspects. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage showed three suspicious looking men staging out the robbery.

"While my sister was distracted by a man, a guy went underneath the table to steal the Angpow box as seen in the CCTV footage," said the groom.

CCTV footage taken from the restaurant during the night of the incident. One of the suspects is seen with a black backpack- Astro AWANI/Cia Cen Lim

The Angpow box is seen missing from the counter and allegedly hidden beneath the table. - Astro AWANI/Cia Cen Lim

According to Cia, all three suspects were carrying black bags.

"One of them was even pretending to be a photographer, taking photos of guests while another was dressed up as a security guard with a vest, ” he added.

Cia has since lodged a police report at the Skudai Police headquarters but is disappointed with what he claimed as the police's inaction.

"They have asked us to look around the restaurant for clues," Cia said adding he had already provided the police with hundreds of photographs from that night.

Frustrated, Cia used photographs taken by his photographer Julius, to tell his story on social media websites, with the hopes of clamping down on the perpetrators. They have yet to receive any information from the police or the public regarding their misfortune.

Sergeant Marimuthu from the Skudai Police headquarters meanwhile confirmed receiving a report lodged by the couple.

He said the case is still under investigation.

This is the couple's third wedding reception which had cost some RM73,000. The first one was held in Adelaide, Australia followed by the second in Kuching, Sarawak.

- Source: Astro Awani 

The best age to get married if you don't want to get divorced

Conventional wisdom has it that the older you are when you get married, the lower your chances for divorce.

Conventional wisdom has it that the older you are when you get married, the lower your chances for divorce.

But a fascinating new analysis of family data by Nicholas H. Wolfinger, a sociologist at the University of Utah, suggests that after a certain point, the risk of divorce starts to rise again as you get older.

The risk of divorce declines steadily from your teens into your late 20s, but somewhere in the early 30s it starts to creep back up again.

As Wolfinger puts it: "Those who tie the knot after their early thirties are now more likely to divorce than those who marry in their late twenties."

The chart is based on a statistical analysis of data from the National Survey of Family Growth, a nationally-representative survey administered by the CDC every few years.

The greater divorce risk of younger couples makes some intuitive sense -- in your teens and early 20s, you're still figuring out who you are and what you want out of life.

That person who was perfect for you at 19 may seem a lot less perfect by the time you're 30.

But what about older couples? Let's say you wait until 40 to get married -- shouldn't you have a pretty good idea of what you want by then, making your risk of divorce lower?

Wolfinger thinks there's a selection effect happening here -- some people who wait a long time to get married simply may not be the marrying type, for instance.

"Perhaps people who marry later face a pool of potential spouses that has been winnowed down to exclude the individuals most predisposed to succeed at matrimony," Wolfinger writes.

It's important to remember that we're just talking about statistical risk here. If you wait until your 40s to get married, your relationship is by no means doomed.

And waiting until later in life is still a much wiser option that marrying early.

Looking at the raw divorce rates, for instance, Wolfinger found that people who married at age 35 or greater had a 19 percent risk of divorce, compared to a 20 percent risk for those aged 20 to 24, and a 32 percent risk for those who married before they were 20.

Another key point of context to note is that overall divorce rates are still on a 30-year decline from their peak in the early 1980s.

But the important thing, for Wolfinger, is that "we do know beyond a shadow of a doubt that people who marry in their thirties are now at greater risk of divorce than are people who wed in their late twenties. This is a new development."

And it will take some further research to suss out what this means for the demographics of marriage going forward.

- Source: The Washington Post