An increasing number of Chinese couples are choosing to live together before tying the knot, viewing co-habitation as a 'trial marriage'.
According to a survey released this week by Fudan University, 43 percent of married respondents had shacked up before getting married. The poll was based on 2,330 people aged between 25 and 34.
“Cohabitation no longer has the negative connotations it once had in China," Chen Binbin, a psychology lecturer at the university who helped to design the study, said. More and more people are choosing to live together before tying the knot in a bid to see what life will really be like with their other half. "In China, it’s seen as a trial marriage,” he added.
Survey results showed that 70 percent of the married respondents had begun living with their partners after less than a year of dating, while 82 percent said they lived together for less than a year before getting wed. Respondents who had lived together for longer than 18 months prior to marriage were generally found to be happier in their relationships.
44 percent of respondents were single and just 1 percent divorced. Only 8 percent of the single respondents said they had no desire to get married. 96 percent of those surveyed said they hoped to have one or two babies, 2 percent said they wanted more than three, while the remainder claimed they didn’t want any.
The survey focused on people born in the 1980s as part of the Fudan Yangtze River Delta Social Transformation Survey. The 1980s generation were born in and lived through a period of massive economic and social change in China, and the study hopes to map these changes by tracing their education, marriages and jobs.
[image via: flickr]
