2 min readSep 11, 2026 06:16 AM IST First published on: Sep 11, 2026 at 06:16 AM ISTForget the flowers, the awkward silences and the tentative imagination of what a shared future might look like. In China, the road to marital bliss may now begin with an unusual question: How many siblings does one have? A working paper by Fangqi Wen of Ohio State University has posited that only children prefer to settle for partners who also happen to be only children, that their chances of such a match are 18.4 per cent higher than those of their contemporaries with siblings.Sibling status may sound like an eccentric addition to the marriage checklist but it is a revealing one, especially given the fact that marriage rates in China have dropped by half since 2017, and in the first half of 2026, marriage registrations have dropped by 7.5 per cent. Interestingly, despite China’s one-child policy between 1979 and 2015, single-child families do not form the majority. And so, generations of young Chinese people have grown up with complicated family values — only children, accustomed to being the sole focus of parental attention and the sole claimant to family resources, are inclined to be reluctant to marry into households with competing heirs and complicated loyalties.AdvertisementIn India, however, prospective suitors rarely have to ask each other these questions. In Sooraj Barjatya style, marriage is rarely between two individuals. It comes with a side of families large and small, and extended kin bursting at the seams with cousins, uncles and aunts. The family tree, after all, is an entire ecosystem to have and to hold, till death do them part.