In China, getting married now costs more than it returns.

In China, marriage and birth rates are steadily falling while gender tensions are growing. Traditional explanations blame individual preferences or changing cultural norms, but these ideas miss deeper economic pressures. To understand the problem, researchers studied how financial reality shapes marriage decisions. They created a model to calculate "marital surplusmarital surplusThe overall benefit of being married compared to staying single, after subtracting all the costs.," which is the total net benefit of getting married compared to staying single. The mechanism works through two separate pressures. Men face soaring direct expenses, such as housing, weddings, bride prices, childbearing, and education. Meanwhile, women face steep opportunity costsopportunity costsWhat you give up — like career progress or income — when you choose something else, like marriage.—what they give up to marry—driven by higher education, a shortage of standard professional jobs, and motherhood penalties at work. Combined with lower growth expectations and single life becoming more appealing, marital surplus turns negative. As a result, rational people delay or avoid marriage, turning it into a high-cost, high-risk economic gamble.

Why it matters

For anyone in China considering marriage, this paper explains why it feels like a bad deal: men face rising costs for housing and weddings, while women pay career penalties. When the benefits of being single outweigh those of marriage, people rationally delay or refuse marriage — and the effect cascades into falling birth rates and sharper gender conflicts nationwide.

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