The secret of modern marriage happiness

editorial comment/note

On August 30th, Ye Wenzhen, Vice President of the China Women’s Research Association, was invited to give a keynote speech entitled "Modern Marriage: The Secret of Happiness" in Hunan, and gave a simple explanation on topics such as "Influencing Factors of Marriage Happiness" and "Basic Strategies of Marriage Happiness".

From parents’ arranged marriage in those days to free love and marriage for feelings today, marriage, which is often an endogenous factor in the family, has undergone an increasingly remarkable self-change while serving the development of human society. On the emotional platform where autonomy and feelings are intertwined, from Qian Zhongshu’s "besieged city" to the writer’s "running-in", Yang Lan’s "management" and Xiaogang Feng’s "wrong marriage", to the TV series "Family with a Daughter" and the "room marriage" that recently made the divorce registration office of Shanghai civil affairs department crowded, the ancient marriage system has interpreted more and more colorful modern stories. Is modern marriage happy? What factors does the happiness of modern marriage depend on? Where is the road to the happiness of modern marriage? With these questions, let’s walk into modern marriage together.

What is marital happiness?

In the eyes of sociologists, marriage refers to a group that is determined by a certain culture and recognized by the society where it is located, and men and women combine to establish a husband-wife relationship to interact. Legal scholars give this group a clearer definition, that is, based on the combination of men and women, with the purpose of living together and the publicity of husband and wife identity. American scholar Andrew J. Cherlin believes that human marriage has gone through three historical stages: institutional marriage before 1850 to meet people’s most basic life and reproductive needs; From 1850 to 1965, the focus of people’s marriage gradually turned to intimacy and sexual needs, and both sides began to pay attention to love and companionship; In the self-expression marriage from 1965 to now, the parties need more and more space for self-expression in marriage, and feel respect, self-growth and realization of self-worth. The significance of marriage as a means exceeds its role as a system, and the freedom of personality and the possibility of choice are stronger. As for the evolution of marriage in Chinese since the founding of New China, the academic circles agree that it can be divided into two stages with 1978 as the boundary. They think that the changes in the first 30 years are slow, and significant changes have taken place only after the reform and opening up, which are mainly reflected in the fact that the conclusion of marriage has changed from arranged marriage to free marriage, the criteria for choosing a spouse and the basis of marriage have changed from paying attention to material conditions to giving consideration to love and material, the ethical concept of chastity has changed from one-stop to freedom of divorce and remarriage, and the status of husband and wife has changed from master-slave relationship to equal relationship, as well as the concept of blood and kinship.

The changing modern marriage is actually facing unprecedented challenges. First, the difficulty of compatibility among sex, love and marriage put forward by scholar Zhou Guoping, sex is a physical life and follows the principle of happiness; Love is a spiritual life and follows the ideal principle; Marriage is a social life and follows the principle of reality, which are three completely different things. The difficulty of marriage lies in how to unify the three in the same opposite sex, so as not to let the temptation and happiness that are used to paralysis and trivial reality damage the passion and ideal of love. Second, the pressure on marriage has become greater, and the marginal cost of operation has become higher and higher. With the substitution of many functions, the marginal income of marriage has become smaller and smaller. From the rational point of view of economics, modern marriage is an uneconomical choice. Third, there is less social support for marriage and more external temptations. If diseconomy is the internal thrust of marriage, then the change of external environment is a kind of pulling force, which directly threatens the sustainable development of modern marriage under the joint action of push and pull.

For Chinese, a happy marriage has always been an important source of happiness, and marital happiness has always been the core component of Chinese’s happiness. According to psychological understanding, marital happiness is a subjective feeling of people’s satisfaction with their married life, a psychological vision that they feel that their married life has great fun for a long time and naturally want to keep it for a long time, and a complacent state in which people’s various psychological desires are satisfied in their married life. In some sociological studies of marriage and family, marital happiness is usually an important subjective indicator of high-quality marriage. More specifically, marital happiness can be embodied in four aspects, namely, satisfaction with spouse’s performance, confidence in marriage relationship, positive investment in marriage, and optimism about marriage future. So, is the modern marriage facing many challenges happy?

Modern marital happiness index

To make a more objective evaluation of the happiness of modern marriage, we can directly ask the representative sample population through questionnaire survey, or indirectly measure the divorce rate.

According to the survey of Xiaokang magazine, during 2009-2010, 77.7% of Chinese residents felt happy in marriage, among which "post-80s" had the highest marital happiness, accounting for over 80%, while "post-80s" surpassed "post-70s" and "post-60s", and their age and marital happiness index. However, the marriage stability of "post-80s" is not high. This group of self-respecting only children has led the new trend of "high quality and low stability" in Chinese. In addition, men’s marital happiness is higher than women’s. Jiayuan, a dating website, believes that in marriage, women’s minds are more sensitive and delicate, and they tend to feel insecure. In addition, the probability of men’s infidelity is much higher than that of women’s, so women’s worries and confusions about marriage will be relatively more, which in turn reduces the score of marriage emotion index. The survey results of zhenai’s marital happiness index show that naked marriage is more optimistic about happiness than flash marriage and trial marriage, and nearly 60% of bachelors and 72% of single women think that men and women aged 3-10 have the highest happiness index.

Jiayuan and iResearch released the White Paper on National Marriage Emotion Index in 2015, which pointed out that even after entering the "seven-year itch", 83.5% people are still satisfied with their marriage. The higher the educational background, the higher the marital happiness index. However, family income is polarized with the marital emotion index, and the marital happiness of middle-income families is at the lowest level. In addition, there is a relationship between the marital sentiment index and the level of regional economic development. Second-tier cities are relatively developed and have less pressure on work and life than first-tier cities, so they are more likely to get marital satisfaction. In the ranking of provinces in China, Henan province has the highest marital emotion index.

However, from the reverse measurement of the statistical bulletin on the development of social services of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the happiness of modern marriage is not stable or even declining, because the divorce rate in China has been rising continuously since the late 1970s, and the crude divorce rate has increased from 0.33‰ in 1979 to 2‰ in 2010, which is about six times higher. In 2012, the increase of divorce rate exceeded the marriage rate for the first time. In 2014, a total of 13.067 million couples were registered in accordance with the law, with a crude marriage rate of 9.6 ‰; 3.637 million couples were divorced, an increase of 3.9% over the same period, and the crude divorce rate was 2.7 ‰; The ratio of divorce to marriage is 3.6 for every average marriage, and there is one divorce, which is close to the European level.

Since the questionnaire survey excludes the divorced population, there is a certain degree of overestimation of the happiness of marriage, so judging from a comprehensive perspective, the happy modern marriage in China accounts for about 60~70%.

Restrictive factors of marital happiness

With the multiple transformation and changes of economy, society and culture, China’s marital problems are becoming more and more diversified. The factors such as geographical environment, family structure, gender relationship, professional income, educational background, age and even psychological quality all directly or indirectly affect China’s marital happiness.

The ten factors that affect the happiness of marriage revealed in the 2012 Chinese Happiness Report are: the feelings of husband and wife, the willingness and ability to communicate and understand, mutual loyalty, children, income, sex life, the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, the relationship between the other party and his family, and the distribution of housing and housework.

Psychological research has found that the psychological obstacles that affect the happiness of marriage are mainly in two aspects. One is the unrealistic understanding of marriage, such as "the heart is in harmony", people can’t change, the relationship is good or bad, and sexual life must always be perfect and there should be no defects. The second is the psychological structural deviation of the parties themselves, such as self-centered psychology, perfectionism, conformity psychology and patriarchal psychology. Sociology pays more attention to the background conditions, mutual rights and interests, the relationship with parents before marriage, the state of parents’ marriage life and the influence of economic development, social transformation and cultural changes of the whole society on marriage happiness. For example, if the husband pays all his income to his wife, the husband and wife will have a higher sense of happiness; The more the husband and wife agree on expenses, the higher the happiness; The better the attitude of husband and wife towards their parents before marriage, the stronger their happiness after marriage; There is also a harmonious marriage between parents, and the marriage of children is more likely to gain more happiness.

In fact, the happiness of modern marriage mainly depends on the living and development environment outside the marriage and the self-improvement and spontaneous ability inside the marriage. The dual social and economic transformation and cultural diversity outside marriage, as well as the lack of pertinence of external support based on marriage consciousness, all lead to the lag of the construction of the external environment of marriage friendliness and support, which leads to the increase of individual marriage survival pressure and weak development, and then affects the feeling and satisfaction of sacredness, glory and happiness in marriage. However, the external influence is only the external cause, and what nature and how much role it plays in the end lies in the emotional foundation and post-marriage construction of the besieged city of marriage. In my opinion, these shortcomings in the internal construction of marriage are idle, wasted and even dried up the source of marital happiness to a certain extent. First, it is customary to enlarge the defects of the marriage system, attribute the lack of marriage to external forces, and dilute the sense of responsibility and creativity of the parties to the marriage; Second, in the family field, there is a lack of new ideas and ability to handle and coordinate marriage and intergenerational relations, and the phenomenon that intergenerational relations squeeze marriage is more common; Third, there is insufficient understanding and limited investment in the stimulation and renewal of love after marriage, which habitually gives way to family affection, and once and for all, family affection not only nourishes intergenerational relations but also supports the operation of marriage; Fourth, the weak sense of equality between men and women, limited comparative advantages and insufficient effective communication between husband and wife have also degraded the vitality and interest of marriage to some extent.

The road to a happy marriage.

Western scholars believe that in modern marriage, the input-output ratio has become very fair. If you want to be happy, you need to invest a lot of time and energy in each other and this relationship to make both sides feel satisfied in emotional, spiritual and material aspects. They also stressed that in order to get a happy marriage nowadays, people need to consider it from psychological perspective, romantic perspective and moral perspective. Among these three perspectives, only from the moral perspective, we still have a lot of room to make efforts to change, so that we can resist those selfish and evil parts in this relationship, support and promote each other and spend a happy life.

Therefore, the secret of modern marriage happiness lies in the treasure, persistence, investment, communication and cooperation within marriage.

First, marriage is the priority. Marriage is the steering wheel of the family car. If the marriage is unstable, the family will be out of order and cannot operate normally. Marriage is still a dynamic mechanism. If marriage fails, the family will be disabled and will stagnate. We should fully understand the family significance and function of marriage, and form a family culture in which everyone treats and maintains marriage, instead of continuing the tradition and squeezing marriage with the authority of the elderly; Don’t put children first, bind the marriage relationship with parent-child relationship, ensure the family space for the priority development of the marriage relationship, meet the resource needs for the healthy growth of the marriage relationship, especially change the investment mode of the marriage relationship, and change the repair after the marriage to the health care before the marriage.

Second, the convergence of value orientation, pay attention to the "suitable" values when choosing a spouse, keep the values changing synchronously after marriage, and make the changes of values in the same life cycle through conscious arrangement of married life, especially through learning exchange and joint participation in important activities, so as to seek more dynamic convergence. With the advancement of married life, it is normal for husband and wife to have different values. Don’t panic, and it is not appropriate to blame egoism. We should calmly analyze the causes, compare and choose the right ones, and reconstruct homogeneity.

Third, love and affection go hand in hand. We should remind each other not to replace love with affection, maintain the proper boundary between marriage and intergenerational relations, add poetry to marriage besides gratitude and responsibility, and live a marriage life with texture and beauty.

Fourth, the relationship between husband and wife is equal. It is necessary to establish the principle of equality and mutual respect in love and bring the concept of equality between men and women into the marriage relationship. In particular, the husband also needs to teach and instill gender awareness. His awareness and behavior of equal exchange of marriage are not consciously formed. Even with this equal awareness and action, it will change with the continuation of marriage.

Fifth, the release of comparative advantages, we should pay attention to cultivating the awareness of marriage efficiency, creating a marriage culture and mechanism that treats and gives full play to their comparative advantages, rationally allocating limited marriage resources, and pursuing the maximization of marriage benefits.

Sixthly, communication methods should be scientific. It is necessary to understand the marital significance of communication, strengthen communication awareness and cultivate communication skills, exchange and enrich communication experience, especially understand the gender differences in communication, advocate transposition, look back and share communication, and improve the interest and effect of communication.

In short, love is the source of marriage happiness, and love can warm the "besieged city" of marriage. The pursuit and creation of love, the cherish and protection of love, and the giving and sharing of love will make our marriage happy forever!(Ye Wenzhen, Vice President of China Women’s Research Association and Professor of Fujian Jiangxia College)