In recent years, the attitude of Chinese youth toward marriage has undergone notable changes.

A growing number of young people have shifted their view of marriage from a “required course” in life to an “elective.” This trend, which began around 2010, is backed by multiple quantitative sociological studies, including a report jointly released last year by the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Social Sciences Academic Press, as well as a 2025 study from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. At the same time, young people’s attitudes toward marriage have become increasingly rational and pragmatic.

The truth is that many young people today are clearly taking a beat and weighing their options before entering marriage. Behind this collective hesitation lies a fascinating mix of hope, pragmatism, and deeply personal soul‑searching.

To map this shifting romantic landscape, my doctoral student Ya Xiaoyi and I conducted in-depth interviews with 34 yet-to-marry adults aged 25 to 45 living in Shanghai. We quickly realized that while alternative setups like long-term cohabitation aren't really on the cultural menu yet—leaving most to choose between marriage or flying solo—how they navigate that choice is incredibly diverse. We identified four recurring orientations: the Resistant, the Indifferent, the Torn, and the Traditional.

Those in the Resistant camp have the clearest position of all. They do not regard marriage as a life necessity and have no intention of pursuing it. They view their single futures with considerable optimism — a life of freedom, control, and minimal risk. Marriage, in their eyes, is precisely the opposite: a concentrated source of danger.

Formative experiences weigh heavily here. Some in this group grew up in unhappy households — parents who divorced or argued constantly — or were shaped by the relentless stream of gender-based violence stories circulating on Chinese social media. One male interviewee told us that his parents’ divorce left him “very afraid” of dating or marriage. Shanghai’s notoriously high housing prices only deepened his reluctance: getting married would mean plowing his entire life savings into buying a house. What if he ended up divorcing and had to leave his ex-wife with half the money?

A female interviewee described watching her mother exhaust herself through what she called “widowed parenting” — raising children largely alone while a husband is present in name only. That, plus years of scrolling past news reports of violence against women, had led her to a firm conclusion: “Marriage is terrifying. Childbirth is terrifying. Stay away from both.”

The second group is best captured by the phrase wu suowei — roughly, “whatever” or “I don’t mind either way.” They don’t see marriage as essential, but they’re not opposed to it — they are the Indifferent. If the right person comes along, fine; if not, single life is perfectly acceptable too.

Two forces sustain this attitude: demanding careers and a low sensitivity to social pressure around marriage. The Indifferent interviewees were, almost without exception, deeply invested in their work. One 27-year-old male, juggling a primary job and side hustle with only one day off per week, put it bluntly: “There’s just no energy left to spend on relationships. Without marriage, you have more time and more freedom.” His vision of single life was quite concrete — control over his own schedule and money, the option to hire help when he’s old, two vacations a year. Female interviewees in this group tended to anticipate the unequal domestic labor that marriage typically entails: the risk of absorbing a disproportionate share of child care and housework at the expense of their careers.

Yet the Indifferent are not without romantic imagination. A 26-year-old woman told us she hopes for a partner who is “emotionally stable, financially capable, and able to solve problems — someone who can light up your world.” A 27-year-old man acknowledged that marriage could bring the blessing of children and grandchildren. This coexistence of pessimism and optimism about marriage, combined with a relatively bright view of single life, is precisely what keeps the Indifferent in their characteristic holding pattern.

If the Resistant and Indifferent have each, in their own way, made a kind of peace with their position, the Torn have not. They don’t believe marriage is essential — and somewhere inside, they may not want it — but they feel they should want it. That friction between “don’t want to” and “supposed to” is the defining experience of this group.

One 28-year-old man articulated the bind with striking clarity. He fears marriage — watching friends divorce has left him shaken — but he also fears what single life looks like in his 30s and 40s: his friends paired off while he rides home alone in a car he called on an app, no one to look after him when he’s drunk; old age with no children, spending his savings on a nursing home while others have family nearby.

A 34-year-old woman described marriage as a “KPI” she is supposed to meet — not something she personally desires but something her mother never stops reminding her about. After a full day of work, all she wants is to lie down; she has nothing left for romance. Yet she also worries: when she’s old, will she have anyone to do escape rooms or murder-mystery dinners with? She wants children — but in China, having children as an unmarried woman remains socially unacceptable and bureaucratically complicated. So that door, too, requires passing through matrimony first.

What unites the Torn is a pattern of high expectations and accumulated disappointment. They’ve dreamed of an ideal marriage and found it elusive. Meanwhile, social pressure — parental nagging, the quiet judgment of watching peers couple up — makes it impossible to simply embrace being single. They are stuck in the middle, unable to go forward or retreat.

The final group holds an uncomplicated conviction: marriage is a necessity of life, and they want it. Among our 34 interviewees, the Traditional were actually the largest single category — 11 people, including eight men and three women.

“No matter what,” one 29-year-old man told us, “I think at the right time in life, you should do the right thing. When it’s time to get married, you get married.” For a 33-year-old man, marriage was an expression of filial duty to his parents. The torrent of negative information about marriage circulating in the media and online has done little to shake their faith. As one interviewee put it: “In real life, you often see a lot of unpleasant things, but I still think marriage is sacred and beautiful.”

Putting all the data together, the second-largest category was Torn, with 10 individuals, while the Resistant category had the fewest, only five. This suggests that among today’s young people, those who reject marriage are still a minority.

Notably, a pronounced gender pattern emerges: women cluster disproportionately in the Resistant, Indifferent, and Torn categories. They have absorbed far more information — from friends, family, and social media — about gender inequality. They anticipate the work-family conflict that marriage may bring, and worry about their safety, their domestic burden, and the professional sacrifices that could follow. These factors compound into a pervasively pessimistic outlook on what marriage would actually mean for their lives.

Men, meanwhile, skew heavily Traditional. Norms around filial duty and conventional life milestones exert a stronger pull on them. Their fears tend to run in the other direction: loneliness, social marginalization, no one to care for them in old age. Even when they recognize the economic costs of getting married, they are more likely to conclude that marriage is simply what one ought to do.

Perhaps the most striking finding from our research is this: whether someone marries is not determined solely by objective circumstances — income, property, education. It is also shaped profoundly by how they imagine the future.

Every interviewee carried a mental picture of what married life or single life would look like. Those pictures were sometimes rational, sometimes romantic, sometimes darkly fearful — but in every case, they were doing real work, quietly steering decisions. Someone might rationally conclude that marriage is unlikely given their circumstances, but if she still harbors a romantic vision of family life, that vision has the power to sustain a positive attitude toward marriage. Conversely, someone in objectively favorable circumstances may still pull back if what she has chosen to see suggests that marriage ends badly.

This finding carries an important implication for policymakers. Our research suggests that if we want to raise marriage rates, the core obstacle may not be merely economic — it is imaginative. Young people’s expectations about what marriage will cost them and what it will give them are doing more to shape their choices than any subsidy can easily overcome.

If we genuinely want to shift the pessimistic outlook that many unmarried young people — especially young women — hold toward marriage, what’s needed is not a louder advertisement for the institution but a more honest reckoning with why those expectations are so bleak in the first place. That means showcasing real models of gender-equal partnerships, addressing hidden workplace biases that penalize women for having families, and building social environments where childbearing doesn’t require professional self-sacrifice. Showing women that “marriage doesn’t have to mean giving something up” will do more than telling them that marriage comes with a cash bonus.

(Header image: Visuals from Shijue/VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)