‘Forced marriage is painful’: bride in China admits she doesn’t love groom in viral wedding breakdown and is marrying for her parents
- In a viral video of her wedding, a bride bursts into tears and, in a post online, admits she is not in love and only marrying for her parents
- In China, pressuring young people into marriage, and in some cases forcing them to, remains an ongoing cultural norm
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A 20-year-old woman in China went viral on mainland social media after having a dramatic breakdown at her wedding, admitting she was not in love and only got married to satisfy her parents.
The bride, surnamed Yan, from Guizhou province in southwestern China, said in an online post that she was not looking forward to married life after she tied the knot with a man she had met on a blind date, a news story on Ning Video reported.
In the video of her wedding attached to the post, Yan is wearing a white dress and unsmiling before turning her head away from the camera and bursting into tears.
Yan said she was not looking forward to getting married but felt she had to meet her parents’ expectations and cultural norms as soon as possible.
“My parents are getting older, and so am I,” Yan said.
“My relatives are pushing me, and neighbours gossip about me.”
She said she started seeking a husband to end the pressure and, after meeting a man on a blind date, decided to marry him despite feeling indifference towards him.
“Getting married is to make my parents feel relieved. I feel that I don’t have a future for myself,” Yan said.
Yan’s story has trended widely online in mainland China, with more than 11,000 comments left on the video on Douyin, with some saying she won’t be happy in her marriage, while others hoped she would become happy.
One person said: “Forced marriage is painful.”
Another said: “I’d rather feel sorry for others than for myself. Life is short. Why does she sacrifice herself in order to make other people happy?”
A third commenter said: “She looks very sad, but would she hurt her husband if she couldn’t love him?”
“I do hope that her husband is a good man, and they can build an intimate romance in their marriage,” another commenter wrote.
In mainland China, pressuring young people into marriage, and in some cases forcing them to, remains an ongoing cultural norm. In an official survey released in 2016, the data showed that in that year, the provinces of Henan, Sichuan and Shandong were the worst offenders when it came to parents forcing their children into marriage.
Census data for 2021 released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics revealed that the country’s gender ratio remained skewed – 723 million males compared to 689 million females.
In 2021, in the traditional marriage age range of 20 to 40, there were 20 million more men than women, the data also revealed.
