Paper short abstract:

I examine changing models of what constitutes an ideal marital relationship amongst urban Chinese. The rise and expectation that marriage should be organized around the expression of love and less with the fulfillment of familial duties is creating enormous tensions within the Chinese marital bond.

Paper long abstract:

No culture is ever completely successful or satisfied with its synthesis or reconciliation of love and sex, though every culture is compelled to attempt one. No matter how socially humane, politically enlightened, spiritually attuned, or technologically adapted, failure is the name of the game. Whether in the industrial city or the agricultural village, there is tension between sexual mores and proscriptions regrading the proper context for expressing love and sex. At the individual level, the compulsion is one of personal satisfaction and emotional health, while at the social level it is one of social order and cultural survival. In this paper I will examine the changing models of what constitutes an ideal marital relationship amongst urban Chinese. The rise and expectation that marriage should be organized around the expression of love and less with the fulfillment of familial duties is creating enormous tensions within the Chinese marital bond. This is especially so when woman are the carries of the ideal that marriage is an emotional bond; while men continue to react within the marriage (as opposed to dating)as if marriage is best when organized around the performance of duty. The two ideals, their interrelationship and distinctiveness present different structural and psychological dilemmas for the individual and the society. A range of cultural responses to the two co-existing proclivities will be explored as well as the gender bias in the preferred metaphors used to talk about love and sex. The data that forms my analysis is from field research conducted in 1981-1987 and then again between 2000-2011.