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I’m collecting words or phrases from people of different backgrounds to explore the different meanings of marriage today.

So I ask everyone:

What does marriage mean to you? Please reply with a word or a short sentence at will.

I interviewed 18 people from different countries, different age groups and different genders, and classified their answers into the following five categories.

Type One: Structural criticism and institutional questioning

Focusing on marriage as a continuation of institutions, social expectations and patriarchal culture, it emphasizes its oppressive nature on individual choices.

The United States | Male

“Legal contract.”

Foreign | Female

“On paper it’s patriarchal ass licking. I don’t care. If it happens it happens. Wedding is for aesthetics.”

17 years old | Chinese female

It’s quite restrictive. No matter what you want to do, you have to think about your family first. Only by not getting married can you always do what you want.

22 years old | Chinese female

“Restraint, responsibility.”

24 years old | Chinese male

Marriage is not the tomb of love, but if one gets married due to pregnancy or at a certain age, it becomes a shackle. Strong alliances bring a sense of achievement but no happiness. I can’t accept blind dates.

⸻

Type Two: Emotional evasion and cold distance

Expressing avoidance, coldness or fear towards marriage, usually not actively looking forward to marriage, and even feeling anxious or uncomfortable.

25 years old | Chinese female

It’s very far away. I’m the kind of person who never thinks about marriage.

Colombia | Male

“Scary chills.”

23 years old | Chinese female

The transformation from love to kinship is what I detest the most.

⸻

Type Three: Emotional dependence and companionship imagination

It expresses the expectation of marriage as a relationship of companionship, dependence and mutual growth, emphasizing the connection between the individual and the close other.

23 years old | Chinese female

“Rely on.”

23 years old | Chinese female

I think this person is reliable and I wish to have him by my side for the rest of my life.

23 years old | Chinese female

If I were to choose to get married, marriage should be about companionship. It should not be a cage that restrains me, but rather a life partner who can progress and grow together with me.

23 years old | Canadian female

Stable. I’m really looking forward to having a honeymoon trip like others. I really hope someone can do romantic things with me, but I hope the two of us are independent individuals and life partners.

Type Four: Gentle reality and daily desires

Marriage is regarded as a gentle picture of life or a spiritual comfort, not grand but desirable.

23 years old | Chinese female

“Living life is a very concrete thing, like a warm scene, I don’t know how it happened.” “

Iranian woman

“Peace.”

Thai woman

“Comfort.”

Type Five: Options and Personal Definition

Marriage is no longer fate or an inevitable path, but a way of self-determination.

22 years old | Chinese female

The opportunity to choose one’s own family.

25 years old | Chinese female

“Choice.”

23 years old | Chinese male

A vow and the ultimate destination of love.

Based on their answers, I extracted the key words.

Structural criticism: Contract, institution, Shackle, responsibility, Patriarchy

Emotional coldness: distance, fear, boredom, exhaustion

Emotional imagination: companionship, dependence, growth, romance

Gentle reality: daily life, peace, comfort, stability

Personal definition: Choice, agency, Self-construction

Introduction:
This research is based on an in-depth interview with a 23-year-old Generation Z woman, focusing on her attitudes and motivations towards marriage and the social and cultural influences behind it.

Basic Information
– Age: 23
– Occupation/Background: Dance Teacher / Screen dance
– Current Marital Status: Single
– Growing up / Living in: Shanghai / London / Singapore

Marriage attitude and motivation

1. What is your current attitude towards marriage?
   Let nature take its course.
2. If you are inclined not to get married (or not considering marriage for a while), what are the main reasons behind it? (Optional or supplementary)
   I want to think about marriage after I am financially and professionally independent, rather than relying on marriage or partner assets. After all, marriage is often related to childbearing and family responsibilities, and requires adequate financial and psychological preparation.
   I haven’t met anyone who can be a “life partner.” My ideal partnership is one of equality, mutual support, and mutual growth, rather than the role allocation that relies on the patriarchal structure of traditional marriage.
3. What is your ideal relationship? Do you find that difficult to achieve in reality?
   The ideal is to support each other’s career development, have a basic sense of gender equality, and respect each other’s space and independence. Even if they are busy, they can invest their emotions in a limited time, take the initiative to develop ways of getting along, and have a continuous exchange of ideas.
   In reality, it is a little difficult to achieve, and I have not met such a person.

Social and cultural factors

4. Did you grow up with the idea that you had to get married? From whom? How is it reflected?
   Yes, from almost all my relatives. Every time I go back to my hometown to see my grandparents, they will say, “You should almost find someone to fall in love and get married.” Grandma used to say, “Wait for me to bring my boyfriend home.” When I was in junior high school, my father said that I would marry myself before the age of 25. But most of these ideas come from older women.
5. When you express the idea that you don’t want to get married or don’t think about getting married yet, what is the usual reaction of your family or others?
   My mom would call me “sick” and she thinks marriage is a “stage of life” that every woman should complete.
6. How are unmarried women perceived in your group of friends or in your work environment?
   It’s normal. Most of my friends around me are older than me, and in their eyes I am still young and still have time to find a boyfriend. They weren’t married themselves, so they were very tolerant.

Structural stress and self-identity

7. Have you been questioned or influenced by your marital/reproductive status in your job or job search?
   Not really.
8. Do you think “no marriage” means a freer life? Is there a “free but passive” part?
   Not being married is not freedom. True freedom comes from intellectual independence and economic independence. The key is your ability to develop consistently in a free lifestyle, not the label of marriage or not.

Review and imagination

9. Do you think your attitude toward marriage would change if there were no social pressure?
   No.
10. Has anyone had a profound impact on your view of marriage? What are some of their actions or experiences that stand out to you?
    My ballet teacher influenced my view of love as a child. I witnessed her falling in love, getting married and giving birth. She was very happy when she was in love, but her state deteriorated significantly after marriage, which made me realize that marriage and love are completely different.
    And my boss, she and her husband have a good relationship, but in the face of her husband’s family birth, she once said: “Other people’s mothers will always be other people’s mothers.” When she found out that it was difficult to get pregnant, the only person who really cared about her was her own mother.

Free expression

11. If you could say one thing to your “future self” or “your friend who is struggling to get married,” what would it be?
    If you’re struggling, you’re not ready for marriage. The right person will not let you hesitate, wait until you meet the person who makes you firmly want to get married, and then decide.
12. If you could convey one point of view to society about women and marriage choice, what would it be?
    Women do not live to complete the task of marriage, but to pursue love, freedom and self-worth. Marriage should be a choice in growing up, not a destination in life.

Open-ended question: What is your ideal life at age 30?
I have a basically formed career direction and life goals, a stable and healthy relationship, and an independent and ideal financial state.

In recent years, China’s Generation Z women have undergone significant changes in their concept of marriage. More and more young women are choosing to delay marriage or even not get married. According to a 2021 survey of urban residents between the ages of 18 and 26, about 44% of women said they had no plans to get married.

Going into today’s society, Gen Z women seem to have more initiative regarding marriage. More and more young women are choosing to get married later or not at all, and career priority and self-realization have become the mainstream narrative. On social media, “singlism”, “relationship shame”, and “staying married and not having children” have become buzzwords, and we think that marriage is no longer an option, but is this really the case?

In my research, I found that many women are not “choosing not to get married in the midst of freedom”, but rather choosing to opt out in the midst of restrictions. They see that marriage still means sacrifices: career interruptions, discrimination in the workplace, the default assumption of family responsibilities by women, and the investment of long hours of emotional labor. What’s more, the non-married face disappointment from parents, skepticism from relatives, social alienation – “Aren’t you too picky?” , “It’s too late if you don’t get married,” “You’ll regret it later.”

All of this forces us to recognize that “not getting married” today still requires courage, and is still not a lifestyle that is widely blessed. Before the elimination of structural oppression, the “freedom not to marry” of Generation Z women is more like a passive defense than active sovereignty.

The self-combing women of a hundred years ago were silently struggling under social oppression, while today’s women are making rational choices in the midst of expectations and fears. Times are progressing, but the problem is still not over.

Reference:

Ng, T., 2022. Why are China’s Gen Z women rejecting marriage and kids more than their elders? South China Morning Post. [online] 9 Jan. Available at: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3162221/why-are-chinas-gen-z-women-rejecting-marriage-kids-more-their
Silva, S., 2021. Gen Z women in urban China say ‘I don’t’ to marriage. Canvas8. [online] 3 November. Available at: https://www.canvas8.com/blog/2021/november/gen-z-women-in-urban-china-say–i-don-t–to-marriage 

The “self-combing women” were a special group of women who appeared mainly in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They performed the “self-combing ceremony” when they came of age, promising not to marry for life and to live by working with their hands. Most of them came from poor families, and in order to escape the fate of forced marriages, arranged marriages, and even concubinage, they chose to take control of their own lives by “not marrying”.

In the course of my research, I made a special trip to Shunde, Guangdong Province, to conduct a field study on the “Bingyu Tang”, the only remaining self-combing woman in the area. This is one of the last remaining communal living spaces for self-combing women in the area, and is now open to the public as a cultural heritage site. Walking through the narrow courtyard and simple rooms, I tried to imagine how those women, who refused to marry, relied on each other and lived together in those times. The objects and photographs at the site, the vows recorded on the stone tablets, and the ancestral hall tablets dedicated to them made me feel a silent but resolute power – a group of women who were not blessed but insisted on standing on their own.

There were also some women working in the silk reeling factories at that time. At that time, the reeling factory prevalent female workers, but there is a set of implicit, unwritten rules: “dating do not want, married do not want.” In order to get a job and make ends meet, they had to give up the possibility of emotion and marriage, and chose to become “neutralized” self-combers. In that kind of social structure, job opportunities, family reputation, and women’s living space are all based on the premise that they have “withdrawn from the marriage system”.

However, even if they voluntarily worked for a living, under the patriarchal clan system of the time, self-combing women were still excluded from the system. Most cruelly, they had no place to be buried even after their death. Because they did not have husbands, they could not be buried in their husbands’ families; and as self-combers, it was also difficult for them to be accepted by their fathers’ families into their ancestral shrines. They neither belonged to their families of origin nor could they be “accommodated” by their male families, as if their existence had been systematically erased from birth to death.

This is not a romantic non-marriage, but a heavy struggle. The self-combing woman spent her life fighting against the narrative of marriage as the only place for women. This history also provides a very important cultural mirror for us to rethink “whether marriage is necessary” today.

The change I would like to see is that marriage should no longer be a patriarchal captivity or a continuous game between men and women. Marriage should be an equal choice based on love and cooperation, not a predetermined destiny, a social certification of a “qualified woman”.

This reality of “captivity” is particularly clear when I study the self-combing women. They lived in Guangdong in the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China, and they actively chose not to get married for the rest of their lives, relying on their own strength to make a living and not depending on any male family. This should be a symbol of self-reliance, but under the rules of a patriarchal society, they became the “outliers” and “outcasts” of the system – even after death, they had no place to be buried.

Because they had no husbands, they could not be buried in their husbands’ homes; because they refused to marry, they could not be buried in their ancestors’ shrines. They neither belonged to their families of origin nor were accepted by their spouses’ families, as if they had been abandoned by the system from birth to death. This is not romanticized “non-marriage,” but a profound structural exclusion.

Their isolated lives remind us that in those days, a woman who did not want to submit to the order of her father’s name and enter the marriage system was not even recognized as a “place to belong”. And this history continues in a softer, more invisible way – when we are persuaded, questioned, and scrutinized for “not marrying,” isn’t that another form of “nowhere”? The change I want to see, is another form of “no place to put”.

The change I want to see is that women no longer have to marry to gain social acceptance, and are no longer defined by “having to belong to a family”. I want marriage to be a choice, not an institutional obligation. I want women to be able to call themselves by their own name and not be attached to anyone else’s name or structure. Only then will marriage be truly loving and not a continuation of a power relationship.

With this in mind, I began to review how the view of marriage has changed for women of my generation. More and more Gen Z women are choosing to get married later, not getting married, or even actively choosing to live as singles, refusing to see marriage as a necessary part of life. We no longer see “marriage” as a source of security, but rather seek to realize our personal values and take the initiative in life. This got me thinking: is this shift a true freedom of choice, or is it a struggle for a moment of respite from the old social structure?

In the course of my research, I stumbled upon the historical group of “self-combing women”. They lived in Guangdong a hundred years ago, refusing marriage, never marrying, and living independently through labor. At a time when the patriarchal structure was more strict, they escaped the control of the marriage system in an extreme way. Although their “non-marriage” was more of a helpless struggle than a romantic freedom, their existence opened my eyes to another possibility – women could choose to “break away from the norms”, even at great cost. But their existence opened my eyes to another possibility – women can choose to “break away from the norms”, even if it comes at a great cost.

Therefore, I decided to take the “self-combing women” as the entry point for my research, to explore the position and resistance of women in the marriage structure in different times, and to examine what the “non-marriage choice” of our generation really means.

“How can you not get married? In a woman’s life, she always has to get married and have children.”

That day I was talking to my mother and casually said, “I may not want to get married or have children,” but she very firmly rejected my idea. I was a bit shocked and angry at that moment. Not because she was against it, but because it never occurred to her that I could do without it.

I realized that this was not only a conflict of ideas between my mother and me, but also a recurring problem for many Chinese women growing up – as East Asian women, we all live in a patriarchal society, where we are always taught to be good, take care of the family, get married and have children, and become “other people’s good girls”. We are always taught to be good, to take care of our families, to get married and have children, and to be “other people’s good girls. But if we don’t follow the “established path”, does it mean that we are not understood or even accepted?

This conversation ignited my thinking about women’s freedom to marry. I began to ask: In this era, do women really have the freedom not to get married? Or is this “freedom” just a packaged illusion?

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