Only until recently, I discovered that many persons I admired deadly are lifelong bachelors: the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the composer George Handel, father of Vietnam Ho Chi Minh, the Prime Minister of UK William Pitt the Younger and the American President James Buchanan.
There are also some dispositions in myself unique to a typical Bachelor: shy, lonely, endocentric, concentrated to limited interests (music and reading), not good at dealing with girls and being indulged in the self-world of imagination and ideas. Anyway, two months ago, I got nearly married with a 6-month-older-than-me woman with a rich father who is a real estate tycoon of Xiaoyi city, my hometown, and promised to help me find a decent job and buy a house in Beijing, the capital city of China with the highest real estate price in the world. At last, I choose to quit from this incoming marriage with the 30-year old Shengnv (leftover lady) and decided to go to business school and leave Beijng, the city polluted by both PM 2.5 and the sour flavour of people believing nothing else but money.
The worry and even the fear to marriage is one reason I give up in this prospective marriage. In fact, as a person believing in destiny, I have long been holding the belief that marriage is not a delicious buffet for most of people and at least, it will not make your life better. It is not a complex problem, and it is also not a paradox like the doubt of Hamlet, it just needs a simple and obvious deduction: how happiness and harmony could be created by people with different interests, different believes, different family backgrounds, different life styles, different networking and even different body structures?
Actually, I have inferred from languages the meaning of marriage even since many years ago. When I prepared the test of GRE when I was in college, I learned another word with the same meaning of marriage: conjugal, it is the adj. form of conjugate. At that time, I did not passed over it and begin to study another uncommon words but stop and analyzed the deep etymological structure of this word. I remember that “jugate” means yoke initially, and “con” means together, so I conclude that the true meaning of marriage is “to be yoked together”, as indicated by the word: conjugal. And further, because the pronunciation of “Jugal” is the same with the Chinese word “猪狗”（pig and dog）, I also give another meaning of marriage: con pig and dog—living like pig and dog t ogether.
Yes, I have some kind of pessimistic and ironic attitude regarding marriage; however, is it a coincidence that we could speculate deep implied message of the word referring marriage? I have been hesitating whether the tragedy meaning of marriage above is the correct explanation of the instinct reaction to marriage of human being who first invented the language until I rediscovered the meaning of marriage in Chinese.
“婚”is the Chinese counterpart of “marriage ” or “conjugate” in English. As the only living and wildly used pictogram language, Chinese characters have more straightforward suggestion of the idea from their inventors. The “婚” is combined by two parts:”女” and “昏”, “女” means female, “昏” means dusk. In ancient time, the marriage was held in dusk, and the girl should be escorted to the man’s house. So the “Marriage” means a girl coming into a stranger’s home. What is interesting is that the Chinese character “婚” emphasize the meaning of marriage to a bride, but not to the bridegroom. It indicated the culture of “look up to men and down on women”in ancient China. A man could have many wives in his life but a woman should only have one husband in her whole life. If a woman divorced with his husband and even got married with another man, she would be denounced and despised by people around her, including her family members. Even now, we could feel the influence of this culture in China. In another word, the marriage is a big affair to a woman, but not a man. So the “婚” emphasis the meaning of marriage to a woman, but not a man.
If we do some more detailed research, we could have more understanding to the meaning of marriage to girl and guy, respectively. In Chinese, besides the “婚”, there are individual character refereeing the incidence of marriage: “娶” to a guy and “嫁” to a girl. “娶” and ”嫁”should be both translated into “marriage” in English, but in Chinese, the specific meaning of “娶” is a guy get married with a girl and the meaning of “嫁” is a girl get married with a guy. However, if we analyze again from etymological aspect, we could discover more shocking culture instinct.
“娶” is combined with two parts: the “取” in the top and the”女” in the bellow. “取” means get or take, and ”女”means female, so the deep meaning of “娶” is a man get a girl, this is what a marriage would mean to a man. He would own another property, like getting a house, getting a table or a dog, only at this time, he got a woman. But to a girl, marriage has a complete different meaning. “嫁” is also combined with two parts: the “女” at the left and the”家” at the right. ”女”means female and ”家” means home, so the deep meaning of “嫁” is a girl become a part of a family. On the surface, this is not a bad thing. But what we need to know is that after a marriage, a girl did go into a family, but it is a new and strange family, with great and permanent sacrifice: lost of her previous family (her father, mother, brothers and sisters) and everything she owned before. In the new family, a girl (now she is a wife) has no equal human rights with her husband, even her mother-in-law. Her only responsibility is to proliferate decedents of her husband and to serve her new family’s members. Strictly speaking, she has no longer independent status, she is only one of the properties of her husband. Her husband has the legal right to divorce her, but she has no right to divorce her husband. Here I could answer my question previously: the tragedy meaning of marriage above is the correct explanation of the instinct reaction to marriage of human being who first invented the language. Our language designers are some kind of philosophers, they have smart insight into the human relationship and destiny thousands years before we inferred our real dilemma from their intricate inventions.
We could therefore reach the conclusion that in ancient China the tragedy indication of marriage is more obvious to woman than to a man, but it is just in ancient and meaningless to Chinese now. Now, everybody is equal, whatever your are a guy or a girl, and this means that the marriage has been a tragedy to everybody equally. The only way to escape from this kind of “jugate” is to be a lifelong bachelor!