THE SINGLEHOOD DILEMMA How Korean Millennial Women Experience Singlehood in a Familist Welfare System

• In Event: Reimagining Families: Singlehood, Childfree, and Chosen Families

Abstract

This study examines how urban, highly educated millennial women in Seoul navigate singlehood through 14 in-depth qualitative interviews. Drawing on post-materialist value change theory (Inglehart 1977, 1997) and individualization theory (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2002), it explores how women negotiate the intersection of transformed values and persistent structural constraints. The analysis reveals that singlehood among this cohort is neither pure feminist refusal nor simple demographic symptom, but emerges from complex negotiations between post-materialist aspirations—autonomy, egalitarian partnership, personal fulfillment—and material realities of labor precarity, housing costs, gender wage gaps, and familist expectations.

Findings demonstrate that participants hold fluid rather than fixed orientations toward singlehood, often resisting categorical identification as either mihon (not yet married) or bihon (non-marriage). Women articulate post-materialist priorities—valuing career autonomy, personal development, and egalitarian relationships—while simultaneously expressing materialist anxieties about housing affordability, eldercare, and institutional bias against singles. The study reveals that while post-materialist values provide psychological resources for resisting marriage norms, they cannot fully compensate for institutional gaps in familist welfare regimes. Unlike European contexts where post-materialism enhances singles' well-being (Kislev 2017), Korean women's post-materialist orientations coexist with persistent structural vulnerabilities, creating what this study terms "temporal anxiety": values support current satisfaction but raise future concerns about aging, care, and economic security.

This research contributes to understanding how singlehood operates differently across welfare regimes and cultural contexts, revealing that post-materialism's benefits for singles are context-dependent. In societies where institutional support assumes marriage and family, post-materialist values help women psychologically resist normative pressures but leave them structurally exposed. The study advances scholarship on individualization, value change, and gender by illuminating how Korean millennial women's biographical choices reflect neither pure agency nor pure constraint, but ongoing negotiation of incompatible institutional arrangements, normative expectations, and personal aspirations.

Author

• Mandy Chan, the academy of korean studies