How To Live Better Tiếng Việt

This book is written about mainland China. Where it says national, domestic or the state, it means China, not your country.

Is marriage worth it: breaking one muddled account into five clear ones

What many people want to ask is a vague question: does marriage lose or gain? Several different things are stuffed into this question: whether the other person can give emotional support, whether they can share the housework, whether they can earn money, and whether you should marry just to answer to your elders. These cannot be converted into one another. Put together, they cannot be answered, so this piece splits them apart and counts each. Each account uses only numbers from official statistics or from meta-analyses (which pool many studies and calculate them together), and where something cannot be calculated, it says so plainly. At the end there is a list you can fill in yourself. The piece as a whole gives no conclusion on "whether you should marry".

1. First split the question apart

"Is marriage worth it" holds at least five accounts. The five accounts have different units and different ways of counting, and cannot be added together.

  1. Money: first, the money that really has to be paid out, such as betrothal gifts (彩礼), the wedding and the marital home; second, whom property belongs to under the law. For the first there are no official statistics. For the second there are written provisions.
  2. Time: housework, caring for family members, giving way for the other person's work. These are all labor that nobody pays for, and the unit is how many minutes a day.
  3. Health: how much the death rate differs between married and unmarried people. This account can show only that two things occur together. It cannot show that the gap is brought about by marriage.
  4. Legal risk: how property is divided, how long it takes to get out, which contributions can later claim a payment of compensation, and who can make decisions for you when you are seriously ill. This account depends on how the legal provisions are written.
  5. Quality of the relationship: whether the other person gives you emotional support, and how the two of you quarrel. This account can be measured only by the strength of the associations calculated in research. It cannot be converted into money or into time.

The fifth is the hardest to turn into a number, but it is the closest to what most people want to ask.

2. The data and sources for each account

Registration data: the marriage rate and the divorce rate are two crude rates

The numbers come from the Ministry of Civil Affairs' "2024 Statistical Bulletin on the Development of Civil Affairs" (《2024 年民政事业发展统计公报》). In 2024, 6.106 million couples registered marriage lawfully across the country, 20.5% fewer than the previous year, a marriage rate of 4.3 per thousand. 3.513 million couples completed divorce procedures lawfully, a divorce rate of 2.5 per thousand. Of these 3.513 million couples, 2.622 million registered their divorce at the civil affairs department, and 891,000 were divorced by court judgment or mediation. The notes to the bulletin state how the two rates are calculated: take the number of couples who married (divorced) that year, divide by the average total population that year, and multiply by 1,000 per thousand.

The denominator of both rates is the whole population, so they are called crude rates. "Crude" means no breakdown has been made. They answer how many couples out of every thousand people went to register a marriage or a divorce this year. They cannot answer whether a marriage will in the end break up. To answer the latter you need data that follows the same group of people over a long time. This piece could not find such data in the official originals.

The health account: married people have a lower death rate, but this is association and not cause

Three meta-analyses have pooled many studies and give figures of a consistent size. "All-cause death" below means all deaths added together, whatever the cause of illness.

These three studies only followed and recorded populations, with no controlled groups. People who are healthy, have high incomes and have a lot of social contact are more likely to get married to begin with, and more likely to live long to begin with. This is called the selection effect. The Manzoli paper also found signs of publication bias. Publication bias means that studies with good-looking results are more likely to be published, so when they are pooled the result leans optimistic. So these numbers can be read only as "the death rate is somewhat lower in the married population". They cannot be read as "if you marry, you die 12% less". The samples in these studies are mainly European and American populations, and used for China they can serve only as a rough order of size.

The time account: the gender gap in unpaid labor is an upper-bound reference

The numbers come from the National Bureau of Statistics' third national time use survey, carried out in May 2024. First, three terms. Unpaid labor is the part of the work done that nobody pays for. "Participants" are the people who really did the thing on that day. "Participation rate" is the share of people who did the thing on that day. The result is this: participants in unpaid labor spent on average 2 hours 45 minutes a day, of which men 1 hour 52 minutes and women 3 hours 29 minutes. The participation rate was 75.6%, of which men 67.5% and women 83.9%. Taking housework alone, averaged over all residents it is 1 hour 17 minutes a day. Counting only those who really did it that day, it is 1 hour 59 minutes, 28 minutes less than in 2018, with a participation rate of 64.9%. Taking accompanying and caring for family members alone, averaged over all residents it is 30 minutes. Counting only those who really did it that day, it is 1 hour 46 minutes, with a participation rate of 28.4%.

The second survey, in 2018, was like this: housework averaged over all residents was 1 hour 26 minutes, of which men 45 minutes and women 2 hours 6 minutes. The participation rate was 40.4% for men and 75.6% for women. Accompanying and caring for children's daily life averaged over all residents was 36 minutes, of which men 17 minutes and women 53 minutes. The participation rate was 12.3% for men and 25.1% for women.

Both surveys grouped only by sex, urban or rural, and age, and not by whether people were married. So for the question "how much more housework a day after marriage", there is no official number. What can be used is the gap between men and women. In 2024 the gender gap in unpaid labor was 1 hour 37 minutes. If the division of housework is not talked through clearly, the gap that may open between two people is at most about this large.

The money account: default rules, written agreements and compensation for housework

Betrothal gifts, the wedding and the marital home have no official statistics, and this piece writes no numbers for them. What can be stated clearly is the rules set by the marriage and family part of the Civil Code. The Civil Code has been in force since 1 January 2021.

This set of rules is useful to both sides. The side that earns more should focus on Article 1062 and Article 1065. The side that does more work at home should focus on Article 1088. A property agreement is required only to be in writing. The law does not require notarization at a notary office.

The cost of exit: the cooling-off period and the conditions for a lawsuit

Of the 3.513 million couples who divorced in 2024, 891,000 divorced through a court judgment or mediation. The cooling-off period covers only registered divorce, and does not apply to going to court.

Once married, the other person is legally your close relative. In the list of close relatives in Article 1045 of the Civil Code, the first is the spouse. This status is useful in the following cases.

This benefit has to be discounted in two ways. First, Article 1219 writes only "close relatives" and does not rank them. Parents and adult children are also close relatives, and the law does not say whom to follow when several do not agree. Second, an unmarried partner can make up most of it too. The way is, while both are of sound mind, to complete a written power of attorney, a consensual guardianship agreement and a will, see Section 10, item 18 (power of attorney, consensual guardianship and will). That item is written about same-sex partners, and these three documents can be done in the same way for opposite-sex partners without a marriage certificate. But whether a consensual guardian can directly sign the surgery consent form differs from hospital to hospital. With marriage, these statuses all come at once when you collect the certificate, with no need to arrange them one by one, and there is less trouble of a hospital or relatives picking at the documents.

Quality of the relationship: an account worth counting more than "whether you are married"

Robles et al. (2014) pooled 126 studies and over 72,000 people. The conclusion: the higher the quality of the marriage, the better the health. To measure how closely two things go together, they used a number called the effect size r. The closer r is to 0, the less the two things are related. The larger the absolute value of r, the more closely they go together. A negative sign before r means that when one is high the other is low. The r of these associations ranged from 0.07 to 0.21. Among them, r = 0.11 with the risk of death. With the cardiovascular reaction during conflict between the two people, r = −0.13. None of these values is large. Still, the associations between health behaviors such as eating well and health are of the same order of size. Some of the results show publication bias (good-looking results are more likely to be published). Some studies specifically tested for differences between men and women, and basically found no difference. Most of these studies only followed and recorded, with no controlled groups, so cause cannot be inferred. The cardiovascular review by Dhindsa et al. (2020) also points out that satisfaction with the marriage and the quality of the marriage clearly affect cardiovascular risk.

This piece did not find a meta-analysis that directly compares the death rate of "poor-quality marriage" with "not married". So "a bad marriage is worse than not marrying" is for now only an inferred claim, with no number behind it. What stands up is this: the difference of "married or not" has the selection effect mixed into it, and "whether the marriage quality is good" is another, separate matter. If you look only at whether people are married and not at how they are getting on, you leave out the whole account of marriage quality.

3. How to count for yourself: a fill-in list

Fill in one account at a time. Do not add numbers from different accounts. For a box you cannot fill, write "don't know". "Don't know" is itself useful information.

What the other person can provide (fill in one by one)

What you yourself will put in (fill in one by one)

How to protect yourself legally (applies to both sides)

Fill in the box for marrying for your elders separately

4. Common mistakes

Mixing up two kinds of divorce rate. One is the crude divorce rate, which counts how many couples out of every thousand people divorce, 2.5 per thousand in 2024. The other is the "divorce-to-marriage ratio", which is the number of couples who divorced that year divided by the number who married that year, 351.3 / 610.6 ≈ 57.5%. The numerator and denominator of the divorce-to-marriage ratio are not the same group of people. Most of those who divorce this year married many years ago. When fewer people marry, this ratio jumps up by itself, so it cannot show that "half of marriages will end in divorce". The Ministry of Civil Affairs' bulletin does not have this indicator either.

Taking "occurring together" as "because of". Married people have a death rate about 12% lower, which is the result of pooling many studies. But conditions such as being healthy, having a high income and having a lot of social contact affect two things at once: whether a person can get married, and whether a person lives long. This account can be counted, but should be read with a discount, and it cannot replace a judgment about the specific relationship in front of you.

Treating marriage as a task to complete. Treated as a task, you look only at the state of "married or not" and not at "how are we getting on". But the effect of relationship quality on health is independent of whether you are married, and a task-style decision usually leaves out this whole account.

Taking the national average as your own number. The gender gap in the time use survey is a national average. The property rules are the law's default settings, and can be changed by a written agreement. National numbers can give you only an order of size and a starting point for negotiation. They cannot give a conclusion.

Where there is no official number, do not fill it in with unofficial numbers. The costs of betrothal gifts, the wedding and raising children have no official statistics, so this piece leaves them blank. The real number you fill in for yourself is more accurate than quoting any institution's estimate.

Sources