The Changing Pattern of Marital Satisfaction in Hong Kong

Whether the marriage institution is in decline has been a subject of debate for some time among family scholars. The same issue has lately been troubling the Chinese in Hong Kong. Premarital sex, late marriage, lifelong singlehood, voluntary childlessness and divorce are on the rise, signaling the weakening of traditional familism. However, it is unclear whether marital quality is deteriorating as the general public suspects. This study uses a global measure of marital satisfaction as an indicator of overall marital quality and decomposes it into four constituting domains, including the quality of (1) emotional support, (2) togetherness, (3) physical intimacy and (4) trust. By probing into the relative importance of these evaluative criteria, we intend to reveal respondents' marriage expectations. This approach helps us to trace the considerations involved in evaluating a marriage among three cohorts of people born in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, respectively. After adjusting for life-course factors, we found no evidence of deterioration in marital satisfaction in our cohort comparison. Among the four evaluative criteria, our respondents emphasized emotional support and trust as the most important aspects of a satisfying marriage. More importantly, whereas emotional support became much more prominent, trust attenuated its influence slightly over time, indicating a change in the meaning of marriage. Despite this change, the traditional notion of mutual dependence, as expressed in the trust between partners, remains relevant to the concept of marital satisfaction.