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Little love for marriage among the young
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CASANOVA said “marriage is the tomb of love.” The Italian who came to epitomize womanizing might have raised an eyebrow at the results of a recent survey by the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong Province. It found that many Chinese young people are nervous about the idea of serious relationships and not anxious to get married.
The survey of more than 30,000 people born in the 1980s and 1990s found that 76 percent of respondents were scared about the idea of marriage and 82 percent didn’t want a serious relationship that might lead there. Stoking their fears were concerns about losing their independence and incurring higher living costs.
About 65 percent of respondents were single and about half were from Shanghai. Most were white-collar workers or civil servants.
The survey results might have been talking about Han Yunkai, a 33-year-old Shanghai native.
Last month, he made what he says was the toughest decision of his life. He broke up with his fiancée just a week before they were due to be married. The banquet room booked at a five-star hotel, the guest register of 300 friends and relatives, the wedding attire, flowers, champagne and live band — all had to be abruptly canceled.
Han says, in the end, he just couldn’t go through with it, even though his cold feet made him a pariah among friends and family.
“I was to blame, escaping from the responsibility of marriage and leaving the woman I loved,” he says. “I thought again and again about it before finally making the decision.”
Marriage, he says, became a “siege” in his mind. The term comes from the famous Chinese novel “Fortress Besieged” written by Qian Zhongshu (1910-98) in 1946. The book described marriage as a place where people on the outside want to enter and those on the inside want to escape.
Han says he had dated his ex-fiancée for 15 years.
Their relationship was warmly received by both families. Like many post-1980s in Shanghai, Han was not able to afford a nuptial residence himself, so he had to rely on his parents to help him buy an apartment. The lead-up to the wedding began with interior decorating work last year.
When the apartment was ready, the couple started living together in advance of their marriage.
“That was the beginning of the disaster,” Han says.
Both of them are from single-child families, and Han admits they were spoiled at home by parents who did everything for them.
“I had to change my lifestyle when I realized that I was to be the man of the house,” Han says.
Indeed, both Han and his ex-fiancée had to cook, wash their own clothes and clean house for the first time. The more household chores consumed them, the more romance started to ebb from their lives.
“I felt stressed and began to think I wasn’t ready for marriage, for family life,” Han says. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but I also didn’t want to feel tortured for the rest of my life.”
The Sun Yet-sen University survey found many respondents stressed about pressures they associate with marriage — pressure from society, from having to find a good-paying job and from parents to have children quickly.
Wu Yuan, 27, and her boyfriend have been living together for five years. They have no plan to get married and no desire to have children.
They work in the same local advertising firm. Wu, in administration, earns 8,000 yuan (US$1,289) a month; her boyfriend, a designer, pulls in 12,000 yuan a month.
They live together in a small apartment near Hengshan Road, a prime location in the former French concession. Their monthly rent is 10,000 yuan. They have no savings.
“Our salaries are not particularly low for the city,” Wu says. “We are pretty average ‘little white collars.’ We can afford rent on a good apartment, buy things that we like and hang out with friends for a drink sometimes. But get married? No way!”
Marriage, she adds, would mean buying a home, buying a car, splashing out for an expensive wedding and saving up to feed and clothe a baby. Everything costs.
In the survey, 63 percent of respondents said their attitude toward marriage is based on materialistic concerns.
“You can’t just marry for love and have no money,” Wu says. “That would cause a lot of problems. Marriage without enough money means your life quality will go down.”
Chen Yilu, a 29-year-old Shanghainese, used to be a professional ballet dancer, and now she teaches at a private school. She is pretty, confident and comes from a good family background. In China, though, she would be called a “leftover woman” (shengnu) because she’s beyond 27 years of age and not married. But it doesn’t bother her.
Chen says she has dated a lot of men, some of whom were very nice, but she stops short of a serious relationship.
“When you are dating, you both show your best faces,” she says. “But if you get married, that all can change and true personalities will emerge — not always for the better.”
At the core, Chen says she cherishes her freedom. She has places she wants to go and dreams she wants to fulfill. Marriage, housework and baby care would be like a “jail,” she says.
Chen’s parents beg to differ. Both are retired high school mathematics teachers. They call their daughter’s attitude “selfish.”
“Although Chinese society is much more open than before and young people don’t necessarily feel ashamed to be single, it is still her role in life to get married and have children,” says Chen’s father.
Yi Wen, a local psychologist and columnist on relationships, says she encourages young people to face up to their fears about marriage and deal with them instead of resorting to escapism.
“A mature people should be clear about what he or she really wants,” she says. “If they want a happy relationship and a happy family life, they have to work hard at it and be willing to sacrifice something of themselves.”
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