An Explanatory Framework For The Formation Of Youth Singles:From The Perspective Of Socialization

From 2013 to 2020,China’s marriage rate has shown a downward trend for seven consecutive years,and the number of single adults is also increasing.In order to promote the single population to get rid of the single situation,it is necessary to explore the reasons for their singleness.The main theories used in the research on the reasons for singleness include marriage market theory,marriage gradient theory,similar matching theory and crossover theory.Singleness is a compound type,and these theories have their own explanatory categories.From the perspective of socialization,this paper constructs an explanatory framework for the formation of young singles,explains the phenomenon of single youth caused by insufficient socialization from a diachronic perspective,and comes to the conclusion that the lack of marriage and love education in the primary socialization stage and the influence of important others in the secondary socialization stage lead to the lack of socialization in individual marriage and love,that is,the formation of young singles is the result of insufficient socialization in marriage and love.This paper introduces the perspective of socialization to explain how individuals form singles under the influence of important others(including family,school,peer groups,work units and mass media);Embedded in Weber’s social action theory,this paper establishes four ideal models of single youth,which are goal rationality,value rationality,emotion and tradition.For these four different ideal types,this paper explains them through specific cases,and uses semi-structured interview and participatory observation to obtain the relevant materials of the cases.Objective rational single youth are good at calculating the cost and reward in love,and it is difficult to find the right partner when there is a deviation in the cognitive conditions of mate selection(on the one hand,they pay too much attention to the material basis,on the other hand,they have high requirements for mate selection conditions).In the primary stage of socialization,parents attach importance to money and lose peace because of money problems,and the concept of individual money interests first and emotion second begins to sprout.In the secondary socialization stage,under the influence of school performance focused management and traditional social atmosphere,love and marriage education is absent,and the biased view of love and marriage has not been corrected in time;The extravagance of peers in love also strengthens the individual’s view of marriage and love in favor of financial interests;After employment,individuals can not correctly evaluate themselves.Affected by the upward mobility of the working reference group through marriage,the cognitive conditions of mate selection have deviated,the concept of interest first is more serious,and overestimate themselves.They just want to return and don’t want to pay.Eventually,it leads to being single.The value rational type is mainly that the concept of marriage and love is divorced from reality,too idealistic,and single because they can’t find the perfect love that meets their own wishes.In the primary socialization stage,individuals take the harmonious way of their parents as the template and accept the excessive requirements of their parents for their future partners(parents,out of their original intention to protect their children,avoid showing the contradictory side of the marriage and love relationship).In the secondary socialization stage,there is a trend of comparison in love among middle school students.The trend of comparison from material and spiritual pay leads to the alienation of individual love concept;At the same time,under the demand of the market,the mass media has created an overly idealized partner image,which makes the individual’s view of marriage and love add more subjective elements;When entering the work unit,individuals lack interaction with the opposite sex in the working environment with an unbalanced proportion of men and women.The idealized concept of marriage and love has been further strengthened,resulting in individual singleness.Emotional type,commonly known as "love brain",refers to taking love as the whole of life and being single because actions are easy to be led by emotions.In the primary socialization stage,the lack of interaction between parents and children and the difficulty in establishing intimate relations promote individuals to develop a sensitive,fragile and eager to be loved character in childhood.In the secondary socialization stage,they suffer from campus bullying and exclusion by peer groups,while the opposite is the absence of school management.This series of events deepen the individual’s inner desire for love and take the establishment of intimate relationship as the focus of life.Any factors that may threaten the stability of intimate relationship will be infinitely amplified,resulting in individual emotion out of control,On the contrary,it leads to the rupture of intimate relationship;After work,the individual’s inner demand for emotion is suppressed by heavy work(love time is squeezed by working time),which intensifies the individual’s inner insecurity,causes the individual’s emotion out of control,and leads to the breakdown of intimate relationship again.The traditional type refers to following the orders of parents,following the traditional concept of love,and being squeezed by the pressure of study and work.In the primary socialization stage,the excessive doting of guardians and the education of traditional marriage and love view limit the communication between individuals and the opposite sex,resulting in the lack of interaction experience between individuals and the opposite sex.In the secondary socialization stage,in middle school,schools and parents severely cracked down on the phenomenon of puppy love,making individuals regard the communication with the opposite sex as a "flood and beast",deliberately avoid the communication with the opposite sex and fail to cultivate the skills of interaction with the opposite sex;Minimize the heterosexual interaction that may lead to the misunderstanding of "puppy love" between family and school,resulting in the lack of experience in interaction with the heterosexual;During the university period,he was committed to realizing the leap of social strata and meeting the social expectations for the success of young individuals in their careers.The individual’s love time was squeezed by the two major events of heavy schoolwork pressure and finding a suitable job.In the case of insufficient interaction experience and interaction skills with the opposite sex,there was also a lack of love time,and individual singleness was inevitable.After putting forward the theoretical framework,this paper analyzes four types of single youth through examples,and extracts the final conclusion: there are single types in the youth group due to the lack of socialization in marriage and love.In the primary socialization stage,due to the absence of family marriage and love education,the socialization of individual marriage and love is insufficient.In the secondary socialization stage,due to the pressure of school and work,individuals sacrifice their feelings for their academic career;Influenced by the luxury atmosphere of the same age groups,they recognize and internalize the ideal concept of marriage and love in the mass media.The individual’s excessive pursuit of emotion and desire also leads to the lack of socialization of individual marriage and love,and finally leads to the singleness of young people.