1 Background

Chinese society still attaches fundamental importance to marriage, which remains an essential step in the passage to adulthood and a marker of social status for both the couple and their families (Eklund and Attané 2017; Pettier 2015; Qi 2015). Although it is occurring later and is now more often preceded by a period of cohabitation (Raymo et al. 2015; Ma and Rizzi 2017), heterosexual marriage remains a norm from which few young Chinese people deviate (Xu 2019). Thus, a prolonged period of singlehood, and a fortiori permanent singlehood, is still a socially marginal situation, even compared to other countries in the region (Jones and Yeung 2014). In China, however, the marriage market is biased in favour of men, suggesting that men significantly outnumber women among presumed candidates for marriage.Footnote 1 As a consequence, long-term singles are predominantly men (Attané 2018). This numerical sex imbalance is the result of a longstanding excess of female mortality, particularly in childhood, and has been aggravated since the 1980s by an abnormal excess of male births due to the increasingly widespread practice of aborting female foetuses (Das Gupta et al. 2013), which now impacts on the marriageable population as each cohort advances in age. Today, the male marriage squeeze is also fuelled by falling birth rates from the 1970s, where younger birth cohorts, smaller than older ones, now generate a shortage of women when men from older birth cohorts marry younger women (Attané et al. 2013).

This numerical sex imbalance among presumed candidates for marriage is sometimes increased locally, notably in the least developed rural areas, by the emigration of women to more prosperous regions, to find work or, often, to marry (Davin 2007). Single women, being less numerous than single men in China’s heteronormative society, have a wider range of choice than men when it comes to choosing a spouse. Female hypergamy is therefore common, with women tending to prefer men who can offer them greater material comfort (Fan and Li 2002; Du et al. 2015), often outside their home region. Various studies have shown that remoteness of a village and poor socio-economic conditions prompt female migration and increase the male marriage squeeze in sending areas (Fan and Li 2002; Jin et al. 2013; Jiang and Sánchez-Barricarte 2012). Single women are therefore in especially short supply in rural areas, where significantly more men remain single for a long period, or definitively (Jin et al. 2013): in 2015, at age 35, there were more than 500 single men to every 100 single women in rural areas, and beyond the age of 50 that ratio exceeded 1800 single men to every 100 single women (NBS 2016). Moreover, there is a growing evidence that men at the lower end of the socioeconomic strata are more likely to be victims of the male marriage squeeze (Ebenstein and Sharygin 2009; Li et al. 2010; Jiang and Sánchez-Barricarte 2012; Liu et al. 2014b), both because they are not desired by prospective wives (Attané et al. 2013), and because they exercise a form of self-exclusion from the marriage market, as they may doubt their ability to provide for a family and to offer upward social mobility to a potential wife (Attané et al. 2019; Jones and Gubhaju 2009).

While rural male singlehood is not a new topic in sociology and demography (Bourdieu 2002; Jégouzo 1972), in China it is a particularly serious issue because of the abnormal and persistent overrepresentation of boys over girls at birth,Footnote 2 which is likely to make matters worse in the coming years. It also poses challenges for society (Das Gupta et al. 2013; Attané et al. 2019) in a country where heterosexual marriage is still a goal sought by most young adults and the socially constructed precondition for conjugal sexuality and childbearing (Yu and Xie 2015). A significant amount of literature investigates the impact of the male marriage squeeze in rural China, most of them from the point of view of single men. They mainly focus on the consequences on single men’s living conditions (Attané et al. 2019; Das Gupta et al. 2013; Wei and Zhang 2015), sexual behaviour (Li et al. 2010; Yang et al. 2012), and health and wellbeing (Zhou and Hesketh 2017), or on women’s social hypergamy (Du et al. 2015; Wei and Zhang 2015), on the impact of massive male singlehood at the community level (Jiang and Sánchez-Barricarte 2013; Jin et al. 2013), or on increasing marriage expenses, that represent a major obstacle to marriage for the poorest segment of single men population (Jiang and Sánchez-Barricarte 2012). But, as far as we know, there is no empirical study based on individual quantitative data and analysing the consequences of the male marriage-squeeze from the point of view of married men. Moreover, most available studies implicitly postulate that in high sex ratio settings, only single men beyond a certain age would face difficulties bringing their marriage plans to fruition. But the present survey, that explicitly identifies such difficulties, indicates that among the men who ended up achieving marriage, some have also experienced difficulties doing so. It’s thus an opportunity for measuring the consequences of the male marriage-squeeze on union formation patterns.

Starting from the postulate that formation of heterosexual unions is necessarily affected by a numerical imbalance between the sexes in the marriage market, we use data from a survey conducted in 2014–2015 in three rural counties in the south of Shaanxi Province, China, to analyse changes in union formation patterns to cope with this rather particular socio-demographic situation in an area where poverty is endemic (Colin 2013), in order to achieve marriage by any means. Building on the relevant literature, three specific adaptation mechanisms are analysed: demographic adaptations (i.e. marriage timing and age gap between spouses), changes in social norms regarding mate selection criteria (notably through the expansion of the notion of a ‘marriageable’ woman), and economic adaptations (namely the monetization of marriage, in a context of strong competition between the men in search of a potential spouse).

2 Data and method

DefiChine surveyFootnote 3 was conducted in 2014–2015 in three rural districts of southern Shaanxi province. These districts were selected because the overrepresentation of men in the adult population, particularly among single adults, is even more marked there than in the rest of rural China (Table 1), and also because poverty is widespread there, individual poverty being one of the greatest obstacles to marriage in China (Attané et al. 2019). The three districts are in an area classed as a priority zone for poverty reduction (Colin 2013), with a per capita GDP of less than 15,000 yuan in 2010, only half that of both Shaanxi and China. These counties are also characterized by high proportions of women who cited marriage as a cause of their internal migration (i.e. whose household registration is in another township in Shaanxi or in another province), as compared to Shaanxi and China as whole (Table 1), but also as compared to the proportions of men in the same situation (that are four to ten times lower), suggesting that the local marriage market is significantly abounded by women from other parts of China.

Table 1 Information on the counties surveyed
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A stratified random sample was taken in order to form two groups, one of currently married men and one of never-married men, aged 28–59, 28 being the age after which the risk of permanent singlehood increases sharply (Attané et al. 2019). In our sample the age of 28 does indeed constitute a threshold, because 91.3% of married respondents had married before that age, the same percentage as in rural China as a whole (PCO 2012). The sample consisted of 1181 men aged 28–59, of whom 655 were currently married and 526 were single. This stratified sample was then weighted using the age structure in each group of marital status as observed in rural Shaanxi at the 2010 census.

The survey investigates the characteristics and behaviour of these two groups of men in eight specific areas: demographic characteristics, socio-economic situation, living arrangements, perceived health, opinions about gender roles, marriage patterns (for the married) or envisaged strategies for mate selection (for the never-married), sexual norms and behaviour, and social life. The methods used in this article consist in quantitative analysis (cross tabulations and regression analysis), that aim at describing men’s characteristics and behaviour in relation to union formation, in particular concerning the three specific adaptation mechanisms described above. When relevant, statistical tests (Pearson χ2, F-statistic or t-statistic) are made to measure the significance of the differences observed between groups. The survey’s results shed light on the situation in one region and should not be assumed to necessarily apply to all of rural China, although many similarities are observed between the counties surveyed and other parts of the country.

3 Heterosexual marriage: a strong social norm, but hard to achieve for many

Chinese society is still attached to the principles of Confucianism, based on maintaining the patrilineal family and on the duty of filial piety (Liu 2007). So heterosexual marriage still has a central place in many aspects of family and social organisation, notably because it enables the family to extend its social and economic networks (Johnson 1992), strengthens its status in the community (Yuen et al. 2004), and because it has been the socially accepted form where procreation takes place (Eklund and Attané 2017). As a consequence, and although the age at first marriage has been increasingly postponed in recent years both in urban and rural China (Lu and Wang 2014; Xu 2019), marriage remains early and almost universal—in 2015, at age 35, 92% of Chinese men and 97% of Chinese women had been married at least once (NBS 2016); permanent singlehood is thus a marginal situation. As not getting married is often synonymous with childlessness and lack of care and support, especially in old age, Chinese society therefore sees prolonged singlehood as undesirable, a situation to be remedied, for men and women alike (Fincher 2014; Li et al. 2014; Wei and Zhang 2015; Zarafonetis; 2017). Beyond a certain age, singlehood can incur social stigma against the single persons and their family. It can even lead to certain forms of de-socialization and exclusion (Pettier 2015).

This attachment to the institution of marriage means that singles are under strong pressure from society and family to marry (Higgins et al. 2002), this pressure acting as a “constant call to order” (Pettier 2015: 319) to comply with the social norm. As a consequence, the respondents in our survey saw family pressure to marry as among the hardest to bear of the situations connected with singlehood. This was especially true of the younger bachelors (84.6% of those aged 28–42 complained of it). Although the heteronormative pressure is less strong on older bachelors (76.9% of those aged 43–59, with p = 0.025), as the families resign themselves to the idea that their son may never marry, the single men become increasingly a target of mockery from the people around them (76.7% complain of this, compared to 68.5% of the younger bachelors, with p = 0.038). Further, at least two out of every three single men, regardless of age, complain of the lack of affection, children and sexual relations, which suggests that, chiefly owing to rigid social and family norms, it is hard to fulfil these aspirations other than through marriage (Attané et al. 2019).

Attachment to the institution of marriage was very strong in our survey sample: nine men out of ten expressed it, regardless of age and marital status. But although they wanted to get married, the vast majority of the single respondents (89.2%) said they were finding it difficult to do so, since they considered that their lack of education, low income or non-home-owning status made them unattractive to women (Table 2). Two-thirds of them also gave the shortage of women in the local population as a reason why they were still single. A significant proportion of the married men in the sample (37.7%) also said that, although they finally achieved marriage, they had had difficulty in doing so, but this was especially true of the most recently married cohorts: 49.2% of those who had been married in 2010–2015 reported such difficulties, compared to 33.5% of those who had been married in 2000–2009 (with p = 0.064).

Table 2 Respondents’ characteristics, by marital status and any difficulty getting married
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The difficulty of getting married induced by the strong competition between the men in search of a potential spouse is felt most strongly by the poorest single men (91.9% of those earning less than 25,000 yuan a year at the time of the survey, compared to 75.6% of those earning more than that, with p = 0.000). This confirms that women tend to reject the men who are unable to offer them an upward social mobility through marriage, who in addition struggle to cope with the rising cost of marriage, as is stated by the correlation between singlehood and poverty (Attané et al. 2019). For some of the men, poverty means they must at least postpone their marriage plans until they can set aside enough savings and buy a house, that is a prerequisite for arranging a marriage in rural China (Jiang et al. 2015).

4 Later marriage and wider age gap between spouses

The strong competition between the men in search of a potential spouse now compromises the marriage prospects for a non-negligible portion of them—who still, however, generally harbour this goal. Adjustments in their mate selection criteria for what constitutes a ‘suitable’ match are thus expected in order to maximize their chances of getting married (Liu et al. 2014a; Wei and Zhang 2015). Studies on this subject agree that a numerical imbalance between the sexes in this hetero-normative social context increases the probability of prolonged or even life-long singlehood for members of the more numerous sex (South and Trent 2010; Tucker and Van Hook 2013). South and Trent (2010) argued that members of the less numerous sex would have a wider choice of potential spouses and that their age at marriage would be unchanged or younger, while members of the more numerous sex would necessarily marry later. The age gap between spouses would thus widen accordingly. Ebenstein and Sharygin (2009) even suggested that the age gap between spouses and age at marriage for men would ‘necessarily rise ad infinitum’ as each male cohort ‘passes along’ the bride shortage to the next.

Mean age at first marriage increased significantly in China in recent decades, although slower than in other East Asian countries such as South Korea or Taiwan (Raymo et al. 2015). At the national level, it increased from around 23 years for men and 20 years for women in 1970 to more than 26 and 24 years respectively in 2010 (Xu 2019).Footnote 4 Although not strictly comparable to these indicators based on census data,Footnote 5 ages at marriage calculated from our survey data shows a similar upward trend: men’s mean age at marriage increased from 23.5 years in the cohort that married in 2010–2015 to 30.4 years among men who married in 1999 or before, and that of women they married increased from 22.6 to 27.8 years respectively. There is, however, no solid evidence that this later age at marriage is the direct consequence of the imbalance between the sexes in the local marriage market, but we cannot exclude the hypothesis that it contributes to explain it especially because, logically enough, the men who reported difficulty getting married did marry later than the others—about a year later, on average. However, the delay resulting from these difficulties is longer in the more recently-married cohorts (+ 1.3 years for men who married in 2010–2015, versus 0.3 years for those who had been married in 1999 or before). This suggests that union formation in the more recently-married cohorts is increasingly affected by the various obstacles to marriage, notably the perceived shortage of women in the local marriage market, and poverty that make it difficult for men to take on the cost of getting married. In the most recently-married cohort, men who said they had found it difficult to get married and who thought that poverty or the shortage of women had been an obstacle had married 3–4 years later than the rest (Table 3).

Table 3 Mean age at marriage and age gap between spouses
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The age gap between spouses has also greatly increased over marriage cohorts (Table 3), most of all in couples where the man reported having had difficulty getting married (by + 2.3 years, from 0.7 years for those who had been married in 1999 or before to 3.0 years among the most-recently married, vs. + 1.4 years for those who had not declared any difficulty). The competitive marriage market thus seems to encourage men to relax their criteria for choice of spouse by considering older women in absolute terms as compared to the men who did not report any difficulty, but relatively younger women than those with whom they would have married if not affected by the gender imbalance in the marriage market nor poverty. In the most recently-married cohort, the age gap between spouses is twice as great among men who saw the shortage of women in the local marriage market as an obstacle to marriage as among the rest (3.8 and 1.6 years respectively). The increased age gap between spouses also seems to be a response to the difficulty poor men have in getting married, especially in the most recently-married cohort (3.3 years for men who thought poverty was an obstacle to marriage vs. 1.7 for the rest). Although these obstacles to marriage are subjective notions and their direct impact cannot be measured from our survey, they nevertheless provide interesting insights regarding individual perceptions in the region under study.

These findings are in line with South and Trent’s (2010) and Ebenstein and Sharygin’s (2009) assumptions that members of the more numerous sex would marry later and that the age gap between spouses would increase. However, there is no evidence that women’s age at marriage would be unchanged or younger, as proposed by Ebenstein and Sharygin (2009). On the contrary, women tend to marry later in the region under study, and this is all the more true when they married a man who reported having had difficulty getting married. This could be interpreted as a relaxation of the criteria for mate selection among the men surveyed who reported difficulty marrying, who entered into unions with women slightly older than other men.

5 Expanding the notion of a ‘suitable’ match

Another way to enlarge one’s pool of potential mates in order to bring marriage plans to fruition would be to consider divorced or widowed women, who are otherwise commonly regarded as unsuitable wives because of the social stigma surrounding their remarriage (Jankowiak 1989; Wang and Zhou 2010). Indeed, in the past, a woman owed everlasting faithfulness to her husband even after his death, thereby entailing notably safeguarding her reputation for sexual probity in order not to be guilty of post-mortem adultery (Hinsch 2016). But the pressure on widowed women not to remarry also had economic motivations, aiming at preserving her husband’s share of the property (Huang 2012). Her remarriage was thus associated with a loss of virtue and often detrimental to her (Mann 2011), as she was regarded as a traitor vis-a-vis her former husband (Hinsch 2016). Along the same line, divorce also challenges the stereotype of Chinese women as submissive and passive, but it goes a step further in terms of social control over women. Divorce has a negative image for both men and women as it goes against the Confucianist culture, which promotes harmonious relationship, discourages conflict and the disruption of marriage (Emery 2013). But for women, it is also associated with the notion of immorality (Chen 2015).

Consistently, a marriage to a woman who has already been married, whether divorced or widowed, has been little considered by our married respondents (as only 0.7% of them were married to a divorced or widowed woman at the time of the survey). Their opinion about a possible marriage to a widowed or divorced woman seems more tolerant, however, as two in three declared that, if not married, they would have considered a divorced woman as a potential mate (62.7%), and one in three (39.7%) when it comes to a widowed woman. As expected, however, acceptance of a marriage with a woman who has already been married is much greater among single respondents (87.6 and 65.6% respectively), suggesting that they would accept to distance themselves from prevailing norms of mate selection in order to marry at any cost. Therefore, this is understandably all the more true among the never married men who declared difficulty getting married: 88.5% of them would consider a divorced woman for marriage and 67.6% a widowed woman, versus 78.0 and 46.3% respectively of those who did not report such difficulties (Table 4). But the acceptance of a marriage to a woman who has already been married is greater among the older single men; this suggests that a relaxation of the norm would arise above all from the desire to marry which becomes even more pressing in older men, more than by a greater distancing commonly attributed to young generations. However, a fact remains that, in the study area and at the national level as well, although divorce is increasingly frequent in China (Lu and Wang 2014; Wang and Zhou 2010), this pool of potential mates is still limited in size: in the counties surveyed, less than 0.7% of women aged 15 or above were divorced and not remarried in 2010, versus 1.2% at the national level (PCO 2012), and men were significantly overrepresented in the divorced population (with an average sex ratio of 227 men for every 100 women, versus 122 at the national level).

Table 4 Consideration for marriage by single men of divorced, widowed or older women (in per cent)
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Opinions are less clear-cut, however, regarding the consideration of marriage with an older woman, that is quite uncommon in China where women’s age hypergamy has been the norm for the past few decades (Mu and Xie 2014). Consistently, although two in three married respondents (64.3%) declared that, if not married, they would consider marriage with a woman older than they are, very few of them (only 12.1%, with no difference depending on whether or not they reported difficulty getting married) were in such a situation at the time of the survey. Overall, single respondents express a level of acceptance of men’s age hypergamy similar to that of their married counterparts (respectively 62.1 and 64.3%). However, reporting difficulty getting married makes men much more likely to accept a marriage with a woman five years older than themselves (64.3% vs 41.5% of those who did not report such difficulty). This suggests that men’s age hypergamy would be part of the adaptations mechanisms envisaged by men seeking to marry. Again, however, this could concretely be only a tiny part of the solution as this pool of potential is also very limited in size: in rural China in 2010, only 0.7% of the women aged 35–50 were still never married, and among the single population in this age-group, there were 878 men to every 100 women.

6 Marriage increasingly monetized

An alternative to increase one’s chances of getting married is to act on the economic determinants of marriage, with the aim to become more attractive on the marriage market. The poorest men, however, have only a little leeway in this respect, as they can hardly bear the high expenses surrounding marriage and, a fortiori, purchase a house. Although it is not a universal phenomenon, it is still common in China for money to change hands and material goods to be transferred when a marriage is concluded, especially in rural areas (Anderson 2007; Jiang et al. 2015). The flow traditionally goes both ways: the family of the future bridegroom pay a bride price (caili in Chinese) to the family of the future bride; this payment makes the couple’s engagement official. The family of the bride-to-be pay the future bridegroom’s family a dowry (jiazhuang in Chinese), which is often partly paid for out of the bride price. In fact, the dowry is usually in the form of material goods (like furniture and electrical goods for the young couple’s home), while the bride price is usually a sum of money (Capdeville-Zeng 2011). In rural China, the amount of the bride price generally depends on the living standards of the future groom’s family, but also the quality of life they are offering the bride: the families may negotiate a higher price to persuade the woman to marry a man who does not meet all the criteria she wants (Brown 2009). In fact, although the bride price used to be paid to the bride’s parents, it is now increasingly often paid to the woman herself; this gives her some power to negotiate how much it will be, and a degree of autonomy in choosing her future husband (Yan 2005).

Several studies report that the bride price in rural China has been rising since the 1980s in response to the difficulties men are experiencing in bringing their marriage plans to fruition, owing to the sex imbalance in the marriage market (Jiang and Sánchez-Barricarte 2012). In this situation, which encourages women to seek upward social mobility through marriage (Fan and Li 2002), competition between men wanting to get married tends to reinforce the monetary side of the process. Research has shown that women are becoming more and more demanding in their criteria for a “suitable” match, especially their economic criteria; and the men are ready to pay out ever larger sums to conclude a marriage in a situation where their range of choice is narrower than the women’s. It is now recognized that those men who are socioeconomically better-off (i.e. those with a higher level of education, a stable income, and possessing property or savings) have a higher probability of marrying than the less well-off (Wei and Zhang 2011). Conversely, the most socioeconomically underprivileged men, who are therefore less attractive to women, can hardly pay high bride prices and therefore often find it hard to bring their marriage plans to fruition. At worst, when they are unable to afford marriage expenses, they exercise a form of self-exclusion from the marriage market and resign themselves to remaining unmarried (Attané et al. 2019). At best, when they end up carrying out this project, they generally marry later (Table 3) as they need more time to amass the money needed to pay the bride price and the cost of the wedding, or to become a home owner, which is one of the main requirements women have for a prospective husband (CMSS 2014; Jiang et al. 2015); in some cases, as they are even less attractive to women once they reach a certain age, older single men also have to pay an even higher bride price, as shown by other studies other studies (Jiang and Sánchez-Barricarte 2012). Regarding transactions made in cash (including money for gifts), our survey indicates that, in the region under study, they are still important elements in matrimonial transactions: 83.0% of the married respondents had received a dowry, 66.2% had paid a bride price, and 63.1% were involved in these two practices (Table 5). However, while the prevalence of the dowry is the same for all, regardless of how long ago they married and whether or not they declared difficulty getting married, the proportion who had paid a bride price increased significantly over time (61.9% for men who had been married in 1999 or earlier, 77.6% for those who had married between 2010 and 2015) and is significantly higher among the men who declared difficulty getting married (71.3%, versus 63.4% of those who did not report such difficulties). Further, from cohort to cohort, the monetary exchanges have moved closer to a balance in terms of the relative prevalence of dowry and bride price, with a ratio that increased from 0.77 to 0.86 between these two marriage cohorts. However, in terms of the actual amounts exchanged at the time of marriage, men are now clearly at a disadvantage; whereas those who married in 1999 or before paid a bride price 13% lower than the dowry received, the more recently-married cohorts had to pay a bride price that was 28% higher than the amount received for the dowry (with a ratio that increased from 0.87 to 1.28) (Table 5). Hence, a significant shift occurred in marriage transactions over the marriage cohorts in the study area, with men (and their family) having now to pay significantly more than the amount received from the bride. Although this cannot be demonstrated with certainty from our data, it is likely that some of this shift is the result of the increased competition in the marriage market that forces men to pay more to get married, as suggested by other studies (Jiang et al. 2015). However, the amounts paid are highly dependent on men’s financial capacity, as poor men can hardly afford high bride prices. Indeed, those who reported difficulties to get married, known to be overrepresented in the poorest segments of the population (Li et al. 2010; Wei and Zhang 2015), paying and receiving much less than the others certainly because both families involved were poorer on average at the time of marriage. Although this cannot be demonstrated from our data (as we have no information on both spouses’ respective standard of living at the time of marriage), this suggests a strong economic homogamy in the study area, poor men also marrying poor women. It is also noteworthy that, while the actual amounts exchanged between the bride’s and the groom’s families were almost equal in couples where the men did not report difficulty getting married (with a ratio of 1.01), those who reported such difficulties had to pay significantly more than the amount received for the dowry (with a ratio of 1.15) (Table 5). This suggests that they are in a weaker position when it comes to negotiating marriage terms (as they received significantly less dowry that the rest: 25% less on average). In addition, they had to pay a higher proportion of their incomes for the wedding ceremony: in the cohort married between 2010 and 2015, the cost of wedding ceremony was equivalent to 1 year of their personal income for the men who reported difficulty in getting married, i.e. a percentage a little higher than those who did not reported such difficulty (Table 6).

Table 5 Financial transactions on the conclusion of a marriage
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Table 6 Cost of wedding ceremony and prevalence of a matchmaker’s involvement in the marriage
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Another issue is that this monetized aspect of marriage has become strongly internalized. Whereas 66.2% of married men had paid a bride price, 97.0% of the single respondents were expecting to have to pay one, and nearly half expected to pay a high price (over 20,000 yuan, which is at least 30% more than the average annual incomes they reported in the survey). This suggests that, in a context of male marriage squeeze, the poorest segment of the male population has to make greater sacrifices in proportion to their incomes in order to achieve marriage, a finding that is consistent with other studies conducted in other parts of China (Jiang and Sánchez-Barricarte 2012).

The monetization of marriage is also reflected in increasingly frequent recourse to a matchmaker who puts the two families in contact and receives compensation in cash or in kind for these services. This practice is still common in Chinese society (Pettier 2015), especially for negotiating the terms of exchange between the families deciding on the marriage (Capdeville-Zeng 2011). In our sample, the practice has become more common over time (50.8% of men who married between 2010 and 2015, vs. 30.3% of those who married in 1999 or before), especially among those who had had difficulty getting married (respectively 64.3% in the most-recently married cohort vs. 39.5% in the longest-recently married one), who found in a matchmaker’s services an effective way to find a spouse (Table 6). It also appears that the amounts paid to the matchmaker, in cash or in kind, was far higher for those who reported difficulty getting married than for those who did not (a ratio of 1:3 in the most recently-married cohort and 1:2 in the longest-married cohort).

7 Behaviours associated with difficulties in getting married

A regression analysis (Table 7) offers a better understanding of the characteristics and behaviour associated with difficulties in getting married. Although no causal effect can be established, it’s interesting to see that, contrary to what expected, the fact of (not) paying a bride price is not significantly associated with such difficulties, but that the difference between the amount paid for the bride price and that received as a dowry matters more. Independently from the amounts paid, this confirms that the married men who had experienced such difficulties were in a weaker position when negotiating marriage transactions, as they had to make greater financial concessions than the other married men.

Table 7 Multiple regression (OLS) of the characteristics and behaviours associated with difficulties in getting married
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The regression analysis (Table 7) also confirms that the most recently-married men were more likely to experience difficulties getting married as compared to the men married longest ago, as well as those with low levels of education or considering poverty and the shortage of women as an obstacle to marriage, as shown by other studies (Li et al. 2010; Liu et al. 2014b). It also confirms the fact that the married men who have a wider age-gap with their spouse (i.e. being much older than her) were less likely to experience such difficulties, as suggested by the descriptive analysis (Table 3). Last, the married men who had experienced such difficulties were more likely to pay for a matchmaker’s services, thus confirming the role of such practices in the probability of achieving marriage.

8 Discussion

Heterosexual marriage has historically been an important institution organising social and economic life of individuals and families, especially in China where it has also been the accepted form where procreation takes place and an arena for legitimate sexual relations, and where resources have been allocated and inheritance regulated (Eklund and Attané 2017). Marriage has also been important for social upward mobility for women, not least for those who have not enjoyed the same opportunities to advance their social position through other means, and this is particularly true in China’s high sex ratios settings (Jiang et al. 2015) where women have more choice in mate selection. This is therefore expected to impact union formation, in particular for the poorest men who are more likely to be excluded from the marriage market (Attané et al. 2019) as they can hardly offer such social hypergamy to women through marriage. In the region surveyed, as seen above, poverty is still endemic and the marriage market is very competitive for men but, as observed in the rest of China or in other East Asian countries (Raymo et al. 2015), attachment to the norm of marriage remains strong. Therefore, many men experience difficulty in getting married, whether for economic reasons or because of the shortage of women in the local marriage market, which forces them to adapt their mate selection strategies and therefore impacts union formation patterns.

This study does not claim to be exhaustive and some envisaged adaptation strategies, such as the relaxation of the norm of virilocal marriage, the development of levirate marriage, or the recruitment of a wife from afar (Eklund and Attané 2017), are not discussed because of the lack of data. Nevertheless, the three specific adaptation mechanisms that are analysed give some new empirical insights into how men cope with a competitive marriage market in this rural area of China. Findings suggest that marriage timing and age gap between spouses are levers that enable men to enlarge their pool of potential mates. Apart from postponing men’s marriages, which is an expected consequence of the difficulty getting married, we found that, contrary to the suggestion of South and Trent (2010) referred to above, the men who have had such difficulty married women who were up to 2 years older than the brides of other men. We can thus hypothesize that these women, who are less socially attractive given the norm of early marriage in China (Jones and Yeung 2014), would not necessarily have been their partners of choice had the marriage market been less competitive. However, although most men—in particular those who have experienced or are experiencing difficulty getting married—would be in theory ready to expand their notion of a ‘suitable’ match, notably by considering a marriage with a woman who had already been married or who is older than themselves, such arrangements remain infrequent among our married respondents and could in any case only be a tiny part of the solution, as these pools of potential mates are rather limited in size.

The present study also brings further evidence of the monetization of marriage in the context of male marriage-squeeze, already shown by other studies (Jiang et al. 2015; Wei and Zhang 2011). However, by analysing the financial transactions surrounding marriage not only from the point of view of bride price but also from that of the relationship between the amounts paid and those received by the groom, and by distinguishing the men who experienced difficulty getting married from those who did not, our findings add value to the existing knowledge. First, they show that, beyond the payment of a bride price itself, it is relevant to consider the difference in the amounts exchanged between the two parties to give insights into men’s negotiating power in this respect. Considering that the men most likely to experience a long period of singlehood are the most socioeconomically underprivileged, and assuming that the same applied to our sample of married men,Footnote 6 we can put forward two suggestions. One is that the men with the lowest incomes had to pay a higher proportion of their incomes as bride price than the better-off men, as has been shown by Jiang and Sánchez-Barricarte (2012), which suggests that women really are better able to negotiate and gain a higher bride price when they have a wider choice of prospective husbands, as suggested by Brown (2009). The other is that men who have difficulty getting married have little or no leeway when it comes to negotiating the terms of a marriage as they can only aim for a smaller dowry as compared to other men—presumably because the woman they marry was even poorer than them and their own negotiating power is diminished by their haste to get married. Then, the above findings suggest that, while some research has shown that failure to marry would tend to perpetuate poverty (Attané et al. 2019), such a stratifying effect would also exist among the lowest socioeconomically endowed married men. Indeed, they not only would have to make greater financial concessions when negotiating the terms of their marriage and to pay more in proportion of their income in their search for a spouse but, as they tend to marry even poorer women, they would also be less likely than the other men to benefit from the positive effects of marriage in terms of both earnings and savings (Zagorsky 2005). In addition to fostering pragmatic attitudes to mate selection and to reinforcing the monetary dimension of union formation, the male marriage-squeeze would therefore tend to favour the perpetuation of economic inequalities not only among the men who fail to marry, but also among the poorest segment of those who achieved this goal, often at the cost of heavy financial sacrifices. In sum, the male marriage-squeeze has to be understood not only in relation to how marriage is constructed as a family and social institution, but also as a catalyst for other inequalities, especially in terms of social and economic capital.