关键词: 大城市未婚青年； 婚恋观； 结婚意愿； 性别差异； 婚恋支持政策

Abstract: Using data from the 2025 Beijing Survey on Unmarried Youth's Attitudes toward Marriage, this study examines how urban unmarried youth aged 20-40 view marriage and identifies the factors associated with their intention to marry. The survey focuses on youth who have entered or are about to enter the labor market but have not yet married, allowing observation of how marital expectations form amid the pressures of work, income, housing, and urban life. The analysis draws on descriptive statistics, latent profile analysis, multinomial logit models, and survey experiments on working hours, income, and online information about marriage.

Findings show that urban unmarried youth have not yet rejected marriage. Most respondents have dating experience, and fewer than 10% report no intention to marry. Clear plans, however, are far from the norm of universal marriage: only 49.7% intend to marry, while 42.1% prefer to “let things take their course” (shunqiziran). Men are more likely to express clear marriage intentions, whereas women are disproportionately concentrated in the “shunqiziran” group. These patterns suggest that the central issue is not a firm rejection of marriage but the spread of conditionality and deferral.

Latent profile analysis identifies four profiles of marriage values: high-endorsement, stable-endorsement, emotion-oriented, and low-endorsement. The first two together account for nearly 70% of respondents, indicating that marriage continues to be regarded as meaningful. However, the remaining profiles reveal that a substantial minority no longer evaluates marriage primarily through necessity, reproduction, or material security, but instead emphasizes emotional quality, individual choice, and personal experience.

The weakening of marriage intentions is closely related to practical constraints and perceived risks. Economic pressure, long working hours, career priorities, and spouse-matching difficulties are widely regarded as barriers even among those who intend to marry. Men more often cite economic pressure, whereas women more often cite post-marital family responsibilities, marital risk, and possible declines in quality of life. The “shunqiziran” group does not express a stable preference for non-marital lifestyles; rather, their hesitation reflects unmet preconditions and unresolved risk expectations. Survey experiments show that higher income and shorter working hours each raise marriage intentions, but trading one for the other yields no improvement, indicating that income security and disposable time are jointly necessary. The online information environment also plays an important role: negative online marriage-related information suppresses marriage intentions more strongly than positive information enhances them, suggesting that the internet functions as a risk-perception amplifier rather than an independent source of low marriage intentions.

Overall, low marriage intentions among urban unmarried youth should not be read as the product of a fundamental shift in values. They are better interpreted as the joint outcome of the changing meaning of marriage, rising barriers to entry, the unequal gendering of family responsibilities, and the online information environment—conditions that make marriage feel less attainable rather than less desirable. Policies should move beyond value advocacy by reducing working hours and pressure, improving economic and housing support, promoting gender equality in family responsibilities, and improving the public information environment surrounding marriage and family life, in order to help youth transform their remaining marital expectations into achievable life plans.

Keywords: Unmarried Youth in Large Cities, Attitudes toward Marriage, Marriage Intentions, Gender Differences, Marriage Support Policies