As living standards improve, people's thinking is constantly changing, and the number of people pursuing and enjoying personal freedom seems to be growing. Being single has become a very common social phenomenon.
According to data from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, my country has 240 million single people, which is more than the combined population of Russia and the United Kingdom. You can imagine what that number means.
• The single rate in urban workplaces reaches as high as 87%.
According to the "2018 Ranking of Singles Rates in Different Cities' Workplaces" report jointly released by Zhaopin.com and Minsheng Securities Research Institute:
In the domestic workplace, Haikou has the highest single rate at 87.5%. Among the four first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, Shenzhen has the highest single rate at 77.23%, followed by Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing.
From a workplace perspective, a range of factors contribute to singlehood, including changing views on marriage and relationships among women, smaller social circles, intense job competition, and high living costs and pressures.
From a regional and city perspective, the single rate in first-tier and new first-tier cities reached 29.7% and 26.4% respectively, with singles accounting for 50% of the total population in these two regions. In contrast, the smaller the city, the lower the proportion of singles; in fourth- and fifth-tier cities, the single rate among young people is less than 2% .
The main reason for this situation is that although large and medium-sized cities have a large number of single young people, the high cost of living and social circles make it difficult for this group of single people to be absorbed.
In the vast areas below the fourth tier of cities, the cost of living and pressure are relatively low. Coupled with the influence of social attitudes, the young people who choose to stay are already married. Moreover, in close-knit communities, the probability of finding a partner is relatively high.
• Once you're over thirty, your value drops.
The reasons for getting married are all the same, and the reasons for being single are actually the same too. Yang Yue, 32, sometimes feels a pang of emotion when she sees couples walking by in the supermarket.
So much so that when she's in a bad mood, she doesn't want to go grocery shopping, lest she, as a single person, be further upset. She works at an internet company, and although she's long been capable of handling her work independently, her romantic relationships have remained unresolved for a long time.
I work 996 hours a day, and I didn't take marriage too seriously at first, so it got delayed and delayed. Some people in my circle who are younger than me got married, while I became a 30-year-old single auntie.
Although her parents also urged her to get married, most of the time they respected her choices and followed her own wishes. So the longer it dragged on, the more the situation became, leading to the current predicament.
Sometimes Yang Yue would ask herself if she wanted to get married. She found it incredibly difficult to make a decision. It seemed this situation was bound to continue.
I'm not sick, I just simply don't want to get married.
31-year-old Lin Ting ran away a second before she was supposed to register her marriage with her boyfriend. She was certain she had no confidence in life after getting the certificate. Even though she and her boyfriend had been together for five years and had a deep relationship, the uncertainty about marriage made her still very wary.
Ultimately, the two broke up because her boyfriend said he could wait until she was no longer afraid of marriage. But then she said, "What if I wait another five years?" This sentence brought their relationship to an abrupt end. After the breakup, Lin Ting became certain that she truly did not want to get married.
To those around her, her reluctance to marry meant she was sick, but only she was certain she wasn't. Eventually, she stopped caring about what others thought. After all, they weren't truly trying to change her or anything; as long as she was happy, nothing else mattered.
She is prepared to remain single for the rest of her life. Although her parents don't quite understand her, this topic will no longer cause conflict at home.
There is no age to get married, only the right love to marry.
In contrast, Zhou Yuan's choice is a form of perseverance. At 30, she remains single, and she herself says she will continue this lifestyle for the foreseeable future. She doesn't believe that people have to get married at a certain age , but rather that marriage is only possible when love comes along.
She longed for love and had expressed similar thoughts to her relatives and friends many times. However, as she approached 30, many relatives and friends said that her standards for marriage were too high, and she ended up in a state of being neither good enough nor good enough.
To refute her relatives' and friends' opinions, she bought a house through her own hard work, proving that she wasn't after material possessions. She was determined to wait, stubbornly waiting for the love in her heart. Therefore, she knew she wouldn't settle, and even if she remained single, it was her choice, as long as she was happy .
Being single is a personal choice, but three problems may arise over time.
Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the number of single people has been increasing. The main objective reason is that with the improvement of material conditions, humans no longer need to marry and have children as they did in the agrarian era to ensure that the labor force and survival rate would not decline.
With the dramatic increase in societal productivity, living a lifetime alone is entirely feasible, creating a foundation for singlehood. Simultaneously, as material wealth improves, so too do people's spiritual world and values. Ultimately, being single has become a global trend, seen as a choice rather than a state of being.
From a physiological perspective, being single may increase the risk of depression . Humans are social animals; we need communication, care, and affection from one another, and single people often lack this kind of interaction.
If someone wants to get married but is delayed due to certain objective factors, the inner turmoil and sense of loss will be even greater. This can further exacerbate depressive tendencies.
Furthermore, being single can exacerbate sexual apathy . For couples or partners, sex is an important channel of communication; both physiologically and psychologically, they cannot function without it.
However, single people lose this advantage, and even if they have sexual needs, they often have no choice but to suppress them and resolve them on their own. Over time, this can easily lead to frigidity or other psychological problems.
From a social and familial perspective, prolonged singleness can gradually diminish an individual's social skills . This is especially true for those forced into singlehood, who often experience a sense of unattainable longing, leading to oversensitivity and even defensiveness in interactions with the outside world. Ultimately, this can create a vicious cycle, causing them to become invisible.
Furthermore, as the duration of singlehood increases, various negative psychological states such as low self-esteem and high stress levels gradually emerge. Knowing how to alleviate these symptoms is a significant challenge for single individuals.
Want to find a partner? Try these two tips!
For a woman, if she's determined to stay single, that's undeniable. But if she still wants to find a partner, then she needs to learn to make appropriate changes to herself to solve the problem of finding a single person.
First, you need to learn to truly accept someone . Whether you're single by choice or involuntarily, the biggest characteristic of single people is that their ability to love is always somewhat lacking.
You must learn to truly love someone and experience that love to understand its essence. Love is not empty; it requires concrete feeling.
Secondly, you need to learn to flexibly adjust your standards . Whether it's marriage or love, objectively speaking, it's about pairing up men and women. If others have a higher chance of success, your chances of success will be lower.
Therefore, never stick to your own standards for dating. Be flexible and look at the person who enters your life from different perspectives. Of course, this does not mean you should settle.
Finally, if you truly want to get married and find a partner, you need to change your attitude towards marriage. In other words, by choosing to get married, you are implicitly accepting certain prevailing societal views on marriage.
This is also the best way to tell whether someone is truly single or wants to get married. Because those who ultimately enter into marriage are the ones who have compromised.
References:
[1] "Report on the Marriage and Dating Needs of Single People in the Workplace: Programmers Have the Highest Single Rate", City Express, 2017.11.12
[2] "Top 10 Cities with Over 200 Million Single Adults in China Released," Qingdao Daily, August 29, 2017.
[3] "240 Million Singles in Cities, Single Rate Reaches 87% in Urban Workplaces; Single Economy Fuels Trillion-Yuan Demand," Securities Times, November 7, 2020.
