Basic Trope: If a man breaks up with his fiancée, he is to pay damages to her (or her family) associated with leaving her Defiled Forever and stigmatized.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are engaged. Bob breaks up with Alice and pays damages to her family.
- Exaggerated: In order to break the engagement, Bob has to formally divorce Alice.
- Downplayed: Alice and Bob call off the wedding, and Alice gets to keep the engagement ring.
- Justified:
- In a World… where a high value is placed on a woman's virginity at marriage, if Alice loses her virginity before marriage, that could jeopardize her future ability to get married (and if this is also a society where women are economically dependent on their husbands, her livelihood). Bob is therefore held liable for jeopardizing her marriageability.
- An engagement in this society is considered to be just as legally-binding as a marriage; breaking it is thus considered a breach of contract.
- Inverted: In order to marry Alice, Bob has to pay a bride-price to her family.
- Gender Inverted: Alice and Bob are engaged. Alice breaks off the engagement, and pays damages to Bob's family.
- Subverted: Bob offers Alice's family money after breaking the engagement but they tell him it is not necessary.
- Double Subverted: Alice's family adds that what Bob did can not be paid back with money.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted:
- Alice and Bob are engaged, and neither one of them call off the wedding.
- Alice and Bob are not engaged.
- Enforced: It's a period piece, or written during an era when this was the law of the land.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: Bob breaks off the engagement, and Alice's patriarchal society does not look well on a woman who is presumably no longer a virgin (and unmarried). This jeopardizes Alice's ability to get married later. Also, women in this society are economically dependent on men, so Bob's leaving her might condemn her to a life of prostituting herself or begging on the street to survive.
- Exploited: Alice's family has her do this in order to get money.
- Defied: Alice and her family refuse the money. Alice runs her own business and earns her own living, so she never had to depend on Bob.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
Back to Breach of Promise of Marriage
