Unit 64
Marriage Views of One-child Generation in China
The 6.1 million children received certificates of their single-child status in 1979 when China first carried out the "one-child" policy. Now China's first one-child generation has already grown up into marriage and childbearing age. However, their attitudes towards marriage are different from those in the early 1980s and 1990s. Nowadays marriage has become more complicated. The two parties are placing more emphasis on after-marriage life quality and stability of family life, in addition to social and economic status.
The children above twenty years old from the one-child families are more tolerant towards premarital sex than those of the same age from multi-children families. "In fact, premarital sex goes a long way in helping both sides to understand each other better. It is not harmful as long as it doesn't go too far", said Miss Li, an employee with a publishing house.
Since the 1990s, extra-marital relationships such as mistress-fostering have become less uncommon, resulting in psychological fear among the youth nowadays. So it is becoming quite common to have a trial marriage, Unsatisfactory sex is one of the major reasons for divorces, therefore premarital sex, in this sense, may help avoid unhappy marriages.
Freedom and late marriage are popular new attitudes towards marriage among China's first one-child generation. In the past, it was a natural thing to get married and bear a child at the age of about twenty-four. Because it was considered an important responsibility to carry on the family line, young people still single after twenty-four were then considered "odd". However, nowadays it is odd for most young people to get married at an earlier age.
Some sociologists pointed out that, to the new generation, marriage was just a choice of lifestyle. Young people can decide when to get married and choose their partners freely according to their economic status and emotional needs.
A pessimistic opinion on marriages involving the one-child generation holds that such marriages would go through difficulties out of personality and social conflicts. Young people are rushing in and out of marriages; many marriages are short-lived. In most young people's mind, real love is all about passion. Marriage is dead once the passion is gone.
What are the advantages of such marriages compared with those in the past? Marriages involving the one-child generation are more mutually compensating. Children brought up in the one-child families feel lonely as they as they have no brothers or sisters for company. And marriage will make up for their loneliness. In addition, the one-child generation is in a comparatively stronger and more stable economic situation, which to some extent ensures the stability of the family lifestyle. Their marriages also have more advantages in the education of their children, as they themselves are usually well educated and socially active. |