Confucian view of marriage
To the Confucians, marriage is of important significance both in the family and in society. The Confucian classic Book of Rites described marriage as "the union of two surnames, in friendship and in love". In the perspective of family, marriage can bring families of different surnames together, and continue the family life of the concerned clans. Therefore, only the benefits and demerits of the clans, instead of the individual couples, are concerned in a marriage. Socially, a married couple is the basic unit of the population; sometimes marriages can affect the country's political stability and international relations ; thus marriage can be related to politics.
From the point of view of Confucian philosophy, one of the purposes of marriage is the cultivation of virtue. In the Chinese term for marriage, hūn is derived from hūn in ancient writings, though the former has the radical character nǚ. This is because wedding ceremonies were typically performed in the evenings when yang (representing days/male) and yin (representing nights/female) cross over. was defined as the father of a man's wife in Erya, but now it generally means "marriage" in Modern Standard Chinese. Yīn, on the other hand, was defined as the father of a daughter's husband in Erya, but now generally means "marriage" or "relation by marriage" in Modern Chinese. The character has the same pronunciation as its phonetic component . According to Shuowen Jiezi, a dictionary of ancient Chinese characters, 因 in this character is not only a phonetic component but also means to "go to" one's husband.