Digital products such as virtual chat companions, “AI companions,” and otome games have become emotional substitutes for young people. Image generated by AI

As young people’s views on marriage and romantic relationships undergo visible change, the traditional culture of marriage and love—underpinned by universal marriage norms, gender-based divisions of labor, and the integration of marriage and romance—is coming under increasing strain, and the new generation is rethinking the meaning of marriage itself. In response, youth-related work has often treated marriage and relationship guidance as central to building a society more supportive of marriage and childbearing, in the hope of fostering a healthy and positive marriage culture through broader public outreach and stronger psychological counseling, and thus reshaping the younger generation’s views on marriage and love.

Yet this advocacy-driven approach may overlook the multiple dimensions and internal logic of young people’s emotional lives. In fact, even as the marriage rate declines, the scale of China’s matchmaking market has exceeded 9 billion yuan. New forms of intimate relationships continue to emerge, emotional consumption is booming, and users of dating and paid matchmaking platforms are increasing rapidly. “Online socializing, offline meetings” has become a common way for young people today to seek partners, while social media has become an important channel for friendship, courtship, and partner selection in the new era. Digital products such as virtual chat companions, “AI companions,” and otome games have become emotional substitutes for young people, and a new ethic of intimacy increasingly detached from real-life relationships is taking shape.

These developments suggest that, for contemporary young people, marriage and romance may no longer be understood primarily through a shared conception centered on the institution of marriage and governed by social norms. This, in turn, challenges the efforts to promote a unified and normative view of marriage and love. The premise of building a new marriage culture lies in understanding the emotional values and ethics of intimacy on which young people’s decisions about marriage and relationships depend. Preliminary research suggests that this ethic may be summarized as “the separation of intimacy and relationship,” while “liquid love” and “psychological healing” are mutually constitutive. In other words, both “public-level value promotion” and “individual-level psychological intervention” may have their limits. Marriage and relationship support in the new era needs to move beyond the path dependence of simply correcting ideas and instead focus on the broader social representations and objective social foundations of youth marriage culture.

Separation of intimacy and relationship

Intimacy refers to a state of closeness, trust, and shared feeling between two people. In traditional society, intimacy was often embedded in broader social structures and cultural norms, such as families, associations, and communities. In that context, intimacy was not the result of autonomous individual choice, but was generated through social expectations and role obligations. With modernization, however, social structures have changed, and individuals have become disembedded from traditional networks of social relations. Intimacy no longer depends on external value systems or institutional constraints, but has become a “pure relationship” freed from external standards, sustained by the personal satisfaction and growth it affords.

The construction of intimate relationships now depends increasingly on individuals’ interactive practices in everyday life. Through communication, understanding, conflict, and other social interaction, individuals negotiate and shape the content of intimacy. Intimacy, first of all, depends on emotional or physical interaction between the two parties. It begins with the process by which one person reveals their thoughts and feelings to another and receives a response. This creates more possibilities for individual freedom and emotional fulfillment. In the age of social media, emotional experiences can be generated through interactions with strangers, virtual personas, and even AI. This fragmented and instantaneous mode of interaction allows intimacy to exist independently of traditional relationship structures; individuals no longer need to sustain a deep relationship in order to gain emotional experience. On this basis, the pursuit of intimacy can also foster more idealized expectations.

At the same time, however, the constraints imposed by relationships may come to outweigh the sense of security and belonging they provide. Many may long for the stability and security that relationships offer, but stability also requires long-term commitment, emotional investment, and a partial surrender of the self, which can appear threatening to individual freedom. As a result, many resist the constraints that relationships impose. Compared with losing a relationship, people are more afraid of losing themselves, and so become caught in a tug-of-war between “freedom” and “security.” Many would rather choose fluid relationships than lose themselves in one that is highly binding. Against this backdrop, marriage has become an optional way of life. Although it still carries important symbolic meaning, its normative force and binding power are weakening.

Interconstruction of liquid love and psychological healing

In the digital age, deeper emotional needs do not disappear; they seek new channels of expression. In recent years, “psychological healing culture” has become increasingly visible and widely disseminated on social media platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and Douban. This is partly due to the influence of popular science-oriented social media content creators, and partly reflects the attention contemporary young people pay to mental health, self-knowledge, and inner healing. Healing culture adopts psychological terminology and frameworks, integrates them into accessible everyday narratives, and offers a conceptual toolkit for self-diagnosis, self-treatment, and self-improvement.

Those frustrated by uncertain real-life intimate relationships often turn to psychological culture for relief. Yet because professional psychological counseling is expensive, fragmented and popularized psychological content has become the main source of information many actively seek out. It is worth noting that both professional therapy and popular psychological discourse imply a similar narrative structure, which might be described as “self-validating subjectivity.” In popular psychology, the roots of intimate relationship crises lie in inequality and manipulation within relationships—phenomena now widely discussed under labels such as “PUA” and “gaslighting”—which inflict psychological trauma on those involved. The path to healing, then, lies in reconstructing the connection between past and present: for example, by drawing causal links between one’s family of origin, setbacks in personal development, and the wounds experienced in current relationships. The assumption is that everything can be traced back, and that the ultimate source of all problems points to the soundness of the self.

Using this psychological vocabulary, individuals affirm the sources of their own trauma while clearly identifying the flaws of others, sometimes even elevating them to the level of personality pathology. Withdrawing from a “toxic” relationship then becomes an act of defending one’s own subjectivity. Yet when abstract concepts take precedence, they often simplify complex phenomena and push views toward polarization. The subtleties, contradictions, and dynamic evolution of real relationships cannot be adequately captured by label-based generalizations—and that is precisely where much of their appeal lies. Moreover, conceptualized interaction patterns can hinder more fine-grained and empathetic reflection within specific encounters. Working through a relationship is also a process of engaging with and examining oneself; other people are like mirrors, reflecting one’s most authentic self. Fear of the possible harm and uncertainty inherent in relationships is thus one of the deeper forces driving the current decline of intimate relationships. In this sense, psychological education shaped by both expert knowledge and popular culture has had the unintended consequence of encouraging avoidance of marriage and romantic relationships.

Many therefore avoid forming real relationships and instead turn to safer, more controllable forms of “emotional consumption”—the alternative choices associated with this avoidance of marriage and romance. These mainly take several forms. The first is consuming the emotional value of commodities, such as forming intimate attachments to objects or pets, as seen in the popularity of Labubu Pop Mart blind boxes and the rise of the pet economy. The second is consuming the emotional labor of others, as in “virtual chat companions” and “cosplay commissions,” where the service of providing “emotional value” is openly priced in market terms. The third is establishing virtual emotional bonds, as in otome games and AI companions, where users engage in anthropomorphic intimate interactions with non-human entities.

From the perspective of emotional value, if the goal is to maximize emotional returns while minimizing emotional investment, safe, controllable, and stable forms of emotional consumption offer exceptionally high cost-effectiveness. Although these manufactured emotions inevitably involve a degree of deliberate performance, consumers are often quite willing to embrace them. This is partly because, compared with managing real emotions, emotional consumption demands very little emotional labor and offers a highly certain relationship. In essence, it is the purchase of goods and services, and thus naturally entails an unequal relationship between buyer and seller. It is also because, as technology develops, AI companions are becoming increasingly anthropomorphic, making such virtual emotions feel ever more real. In turn, this is blurring the boundary between the virtual and the real, while also bringing ethical questions such as “human-machine romance” increasingly to the fore.

In sum, the future of marriage and relationship guidance may lie less in teaching young people what they ought to choose than in equipping them with the capacities and conditions to choose better. When young people detach their emotional needs from the institution of marriage and turn instead to more flexible, more individual-experience-oriented forms of intimacy, simple value promotion or psychological adjustment can scarcely reach the heart of the issue. The future of marriage and relationship support must move beyond one-dimensional “education” and attend instead to the structural forces behind youth marriage culture, including labor relations, gender roles, and digital transformation. Only by acknowledging young people’s subjective experience, and by rebuilding stable and meaningful connections through institutional support and a more enabling social environment, can society help them in the age of “liquid intimacy.”

Liu Zixi is a professor from the School of Sociology and Anthropology at Xiamen University.