Behind closed doors

All is never as it seems behind the door across the street, a situation many films and novels, even William Shakespeare's works, have touched upon. What may, from the outside, seem like a perfect situation, may in fact be nothing more than a gilded cage.

This is also the theme explored in writer Qiao Mai's new novel, Common Marriage.

The novel tells the stories of a couple who fall in love during their university years and get married after graduation.

To the casual onlooker, the couple, both young people in their 20s, are in the enviable position of having stable, decent jobs, owning a spacious apartment and a nice car in a second-tier city and living a married life without money troubles, affairs or interfering parents.

However, what Qiao wants to write about is actually a seemingly happy marriage falling apart.

The protagonist, Xia Yue, at 25, marries Fang Chen, a mild, thoughtful man who earns a considerable income. However, the longer they stay in the intimate relationship, the more obvious it becomes that the husband fails to be a soul mate to, or have a true connection with, his wife.

Xia finds that although Fang is a seemingly nice man, he rarely ponders over things from her perspective and never takes her considerations into account. He has a very shallow understanding of life, which causes their breakup.

The author says she wants to write about a Chinese woman who tries to think about what kind of person she wants to be and examine the intimacy in her married life.

"Xia is different from those Chinese women in a traditional context who are labeled 'tender', 'emotional', 'longing for men's love', or 'willing to sacrifice for family'," says Qiao, adding that she wants to tear off these labels and chronicle a woman's journey of self-discovery in the novel.

More than 4.7 million couples registered their divorce in 2019, up 5.4 percent from a year earlier. And the marriage rate in China has fallen from 9 percent in 2015 to 6.6 percent in 2019, according to the statistics released by the Ministry of Civil Affairs on Sept 8, 2020.

Among all the reasons for the increasing number of divorced couples and the decline in marriage rates, the changes in people's understanding of relationships and marriage is a significant factor.

Qiao says she notices the changes from multiple social media platforms, especially Sina Weibo. She has gained nearly 1.4 million followers on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter for that she frequently expresses opinions on social topics closely related to women, such as naming rights, domestic violence and the implement of cooling-off period before divorce.