A young woman told me: she and her boyfriend had a three-hour phone call going over the specific challenges they might face in marriage.
She had prepared a memo in advance.
They reached no conclusions.
The topics included: how would they share the responsibility of raising children? What specific educational path would they take? If one parent needed to sacrifice their career, whose would it be?
I understand her anxiety, and her need to nail everything down before moving forward. She wants to live her life with intention — which is why she wants plans, contingencies, and fallback options.
But I also understand why the conversation went nowhere.
Take “sacrificing a career,” for example. The standard answer would be: whoever has the weaker career gives it up. And that answer almost always means the mother sacrifices.
At least in China, women’s average income is only two-thirds of men’s. The math says you sacrifice the one earning less — not the one earning more.
But if marriage and having children inevitably means women must sacrifice, that is simply unfair, no matter how you frame it.
So how do you break out of this trap? Does the answer have to be that the woman achieves career success first?
But if both partners are already career successes, do they even need a conventional marriage?
This is an unsolvable problem.
Some things must be discussed — only by talking them through can you understand where you stand. But talking, in itself, cannot produce answers.
How many young couples decided they would raise their children themselves, with no help from either set of grandparents — only to find themselves overwhelmed and calling the grandparents anyway? How many mothers-in-law and mothers promised to help with childcare, then fell ill or ran into some other unexpected obstacle, and couldn’t follow through?
How many parents mapped out an ambitious, near-perfect life path for their child — only to watch the child walk an entirely different road?
What do you do then?
There is no standard answer.
Choose the option that feels right to you — and own it without regret. That is the most important thing.