Three conditions of not married
There are over 120 million people in China over the age of 30 and having not entered their first union. The data quality is dubious at best as it was estimated. There are always more men in this category than women thanks to hypergamy in age and socioeconomic status, but it’s reasonable to assume over 50 million females in China have not entered the first union at 30. It’s very common in major cities for females to not get married before 30 and later. Nothing surprising of any nature at all and the label of left-over men and women is by itself quite outdated and cliché.
Then you heard the kitsch wannabe folk song of plastic fast food quality by hard working yet untalented singer like Zhao Lei, giving eulogy to the miserable yet tempting lifestyle of women in their 30s in his imagination. It’s hard to not imagine though, what it takes to be an unmarried woman in urban China in the modern time. Much research has been done on this subject, ranging from the revelation of their resistance strategies to minuscule deep writing on their cultivation of new identities. I can’t say much, it’s not my field of familiarity and I harbor bias. I knew it. I have learned a lot from the manosphere.
I can only think of the counterfactuals and the potentiality of their future under parallel counterfactual worlds, if objectivity has to be in my thought on this issue. The first counterfactual is what if the same exact persons are married, through miraculous means, at the same age. This might come through involuntary means such as arranged marriage or rape marriage. Although both types are on a decline in China, various variations of the latter type resurfaced to people’s attention after the Xuzhou incidence. People wouldn’t need to suffer from the abundance of choice paradox anymore now that they are assigned a post and a career. Meanwhile, they could be unhappy stuck in an involuntary relationship.
The second counterfactual has to do with a change in time and space. What if the same persons live in a different society or country where the mating market fundamentally improves their outlook and choice spectrum. Asian females’ superior matching likelihood and wider compatibility, which are second only to white females, seem to depict a vastly advantageous prospect for the same group of females. This counterfactual scenario would at least slash a large portion of unmarried females at 30.
The third counterfactual imagines the swape of gender among this group of females. Now, would the situation be any different if they were male? Males of higher income and educational level living in the urban usually do not always have a large host of candidate girls on the mating market to fill his harem. But they do fare better in China’s urban mating market in terms of the likelihood of getting married. However, urban females only fare worse because they conform to hypergamy rules. If they become male and follow the same hypergamy rule that their spouse should be younger and poorer, getting married at 30 wouldn’t be the same problem as it is for females.
In these three scenarios employing counterfactual thinking, you can see three conditions to which females not getting married at 30 is subjected. First is the method of union: it has to be free and voluntary; second, a mating market that does not prefer them over other races; third, gender. It is under the joint force of these 3 conditions that individual females in urban China found marrying harder. And it is also these 3 conditions that created the structural problem of the delayed first union rate in today’s Chinese society. Individuals can try harder and improve their own prospective competition, but these structural conditions already have constrained how far you can go on your own. Instead of asking what people can do to find the right spouse, it makes more sense to have them choose a different and more favorable condition for the cause. Although there is very little room to wiggle too.
I mean, a lot of these women are leading a happy and fulfilling life, and people tend to make believe they are happy in the current situation. Sometimes it comes to my mind how are some people doing and are they content about things right now. Then I realize how individuals are doing and what is in their mind is just too idiosyncratic random incidences that carry little meaning when they retreat into the crowd and you zoom out the map. What matters are the structural conditions that make a social phenomenon possible. Le fait social, the ultimate cold and unfeeling reality above the realities you hear, see, and touch.
