AH MAN DATED Sang for 14 years. They moved in together, with his family, two months after they met. Last year, Ah Man, 36, became pregnant - 'an accident', she says. Finally, after turning down several proposals from Sang, 37, she agreed to marry him. They were wed last September, when their baby girl was three months old.
'I was afraid to get married,' says Ah Man, a Hong Kong professional who didn't want to reveal her or her husband's surnames. 'I think a single woman has a better image and is more attractive to other people. But I started thinking about the child - about what would happen to her identity if her mother and father weren't married. In the end, even though I didn't want to get married; I still followed the traditional route.'
Such stories are no longer so rare, as increasing numbers of young Hong Kong couples break from marriage and family traditions. Sociological studies and anecdotal evidence show more couples are dating longer and marrying later, having premarital sex and moving in together, sometimes early on in the relationship. As a result of a growing focus on quality of life, both for adults and children, they are also delaying parenthood and having fewer children, or deciding not to have children at all. And if, in the end, they decide marriage was a mistake, they're turning to divorce in far greater numbers than did earlier generations.
Many of these changes are being driven by trends such as the increased pursuit of higher education in the past decade and the rapid increase in the number of women in the workforce over the past 20 years, says Ting Kwok-fai, an associate professor of sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. With their greater independence, women are realising they don't have to blindly follow a script. Men are taking on more active parenting roles and accepting their wives as equals - and even leaders.
'There's a big change in women's attitudes towards family,' Ting says. 'They don't need to get married. They can depend on themselves. Now, for both men and women, you have to think of a good reason to have kids. In the past, you didn't have to think about this - it was natural. But Hong Kong people nowadays pay more attention to the quality of family life, and they value the quality of the kids' life.'
Similarly, 'young people think if you don't have a happy marriage, it's OK to get divorced', Ting says, whereas their parents' generation would usually stick it out, regardless of circumstances. The introduction of no-fault divorce facilitated the process, with almost 14,000 dissolutions granted in 2003, compared with fewer than 2,100 in 1981, according to the courts.