Pham 1

Anh Pham
WR 112 E1
Paper 2
31 October 2024
Is Establishing a Family Necessary in One’s Pursuit of Happiness?

We live in a society where people are expected to settle down and build a family to feel

fulfillment and happiness. Such a standard is implied by Christina Larsen’s impression of the

Chinese government as it has been subtly putting pressure on sheng-nu, or overage single

Chinese women, to get married to ensure a happy life and a harmonious society. However, after

reading Andrew Guest’s essay, I wonder if building a family is truly a Chinese woman’s route

toward happiness or if it is a social superstition created by the government to combat China’s

urgent need for babies. Larsen’s “The Startling Plight of China’s Leftover Ladies” and Guest’s

“Pursuing the Science of Happiness” lead to a question of whether establishing a family and

having children are prominent in one’s pursuit of happiness.

On the one hand, happiness through family and children can be seen as a façade created

by the Chinese government to solve their problem of an aging population. As Larsen highlights

in her essay: “For centuries, Chinese families preferred male children because girls were obliged

to leave home eventually and move into their husband’s household rather than stay and take care

of their parents; the advent of the one-child policy in 1980 only increased the stakes” (284),

China has long been notorious for their One-Child Policy that further perpetuated the centuries-

old problem of gender discrimination as families chose to abort baby girls. Such a policy has led

to a male-skewed population in China. That issue and China’s economic miracle have resulted in

“rising marriage ages and divorce rates, even as the One-Child Policy has driven down fertility”

(286). Thus, when the Chinese government sees women who choose to remain single beyond the
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desirable age because they cannot find anyone who meets their standards, they promote the idea

that women getting married and having children mean a happy life, leading to a happy society as

Larsen illustrates: “A harmonious family is the cornerstone of a harmonious society” (287).

However, is the reality of establishing one’s own family and raising children as joyous as the

Chinese government suggests? Guest counters this belief in his essay by firmly stating that

“something around half of our happiness is determined by hardwired dispositions, another forty

percent is shaped by voluntary activities. Of course, that means a mere ten percent is down to the

circumstances of our lives” (99). In short, forcing sheng-nu, or ladies who choose to remain

unmarried beyond the expected age, to lower their expectation or “don’t demand too much from

your man” (287) to get married is neither “hardwired dispositions,” nor “voluntary activities.”

For the remaining ten percent, Larsen would argue that many sheng-nu are relatively happy with

their current circumstance, regardless of their future possibilities of building a family as Annie

Xu, a single woman that Larsen interviewed in Beijing who was “anything but dowdy,”

expresses: “I am 30 years old; I am not afraid of being alone. It’s just like, when you pass the

age, everything is just OK” (288). Considering the idea that having children brings happiness,

Guest affirms:

One other provocative example of a life circumstance that seems to have little
relationship to happiness is having children. In the popular imagination, children are
often the joy of their parents’ lives, but the evidence suggests otherwise. In a
phenomenon some scholars call the “parenting paradox,” no matter how you measure it
—looking at overall well-being, day-to-day emotional states, broader life satisfaction—
people with children are no happier than people without children (unless, some research
suggests, the childless people wanted to have children but couldn't). Children bring joys,
but they also bring burdens and anxieties. The fact that we are convinced children will
make us happy may just be another peculiar trick of human nature. (99, 100)

There are a lot of factors when it comes to parenting. While it may be true that children may

bring happiness to people’s lives, only looking at the optimistic side of raising an infant to
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adulthood is no different than viewing life through rose-tinted lens. Along with bliss, they bring

parents a lot of stress and burdens, namely emotional and financial ones.

On the other hand, willingly getting married and building one’s own family can be

fundamental to one’s happiness. While sheng-nu are financially independent and intellectual

women, one of the main reasons sheng-nu decide not to get married is the inability to find a

fitting man who can meet their expectations. Hypothetically, if they were to find a person that

meets all of their needs, I see no reason why they could not achieve a family and happiness with

that person. As Guest claims:

Most of the modern science exploring the source of real happiness seems to come back to
a formulation that Freud famously (and perhaps apocryphally) proposed a century ago:
love and work. Love, in its broadest definition as healthy social relationships and
meaningful interpersonal engagements, seems to matter. Social isolation is one of the best
predictors of depression and other mental health problems. Being married and having
friends, however, is one of the best predictors of well-being. There are many nuances to
how love can play out in our lives, but at the most general level, being connected to
people matter. (100)

In short, getting married and establishing a functional family is when people can have deep and

personal relationships. Those connections can be their husband, wife, children, or in-laws;

regardless, healthy connections to people can certainly bring happiness. Larsen further

strengthens this point with her interview with Annie Xu, as she asserts: “She still hopes to get

married one day, if she finds the right partner, but when I asked what would happen if she were

still single at 50, she said, “I think it’s OK. I am most afraid of marrying with the wrong man”

(288). All in all, it is not the problem of whether people are married or not, but whether they

have married the right person.

In conclusion, establishing a family is not a necessity in one’s pursuit of happiness.

However, when the time and circumstances are appropriate, the source of one’s happiness can be

rooted in the sincere connections budding from a family.

Works Cited

Guest, Andrew. “Pursuing the Science of Happiness.” Oregon Humanities, winter/fall edition,

2010. Publish.

Larson, Christina. “The Startling Plight of China’s Leftover Ladies.” Foreign Policy, Foreign

Policy, 23 Apr. 2012, foreignpolicy.com/2012/04/23/the-startling-plight-of-chinas-

leftover-ladies/.