10 Chinese Idioms About Marriage & Married Life

Treat others as yourself

Literal: Exchange heart for heart

To exchange (换) one heart (心) for another, using (以) your own as the thing you give. The image is of trust as a swap rather than a demand: you put your own candour in first and take the other person's in return. This is a common set phrase rather than a classical idiom — it has no locus classicus an...

Value harmony above all

Literal: Value harmony as precious

This descends from the Analects, where Master You says that in the working of ritual, harmony (和) is what is precious (贵) — 礼之用，和为贵. The claim is more careful than it looks: harmony is the point of the forms, but he adds at once that harmony pursued without the forms will not stand. Modern usage adv...

Face challenges together

Literal: Cross river in same boat

This idiom shares deep connections with China's river-centric civilization, where crossing (济) together (共) in the same boat (同舟) was often a matter of life and death. Ancient texts tell of strangers becoming allies when facing treacherous waters, especially along the mighty Yangtze. During the Thre...

Love extends to all connections

Literal: Love house and its crow

Loving (爱) a house (屋) and extending that (及) even to the crows (乌) on its roof. The formulation comes from an early gloss on the Zhou conquest — he who loves a man loves even the crows on his roof — and the crow is chosen because it is the least lovable bird available, which is the entire force of ...

Instant friendship

Literal: Canopies tilt, like old friends

倾盖 is what happens when two carriages stop alongside on the road and their canopies tilt toward one another — the drivers have paused to talk. Zou Yang, writing from prison, set it against its opposite: 白头如新，倾盖如故, some go grey together and remain strangers, others tilt their canopies once and are ol...

Childhood sweethearts or friends

Literal: Green plums and bamboo horses

Li Bai's Changgan Ballad has a woman remembering her husband when both were small: he came riding a bamboo horse (竹马), and they circled the well playing with green plums (青梅). The two props are ordinary children's things and the poem is about a marriage that grew out of them. The phrase names that s...

Inseparable; always together

Literal: Body and shadow never separate

Form (形) and shadow (影) not (不) parting (离). The image is of company as unbreakable as the one thing that genuinely cannot leave you — and Chinese poetry had long used the shadow the other way about, as the only companion a solitary person has. That older and bleaker sense sits underneath the modern...

Be perfectly compatible; hit it off

Literal: Feelings accord, intentions agree

Feelings (情) thrown toward each other (投) and intentions (意) meeting (合). 投 here is not 'to throw' but 契合, to fit or accord — the same sense as 合 in the second half — so both halves say agreement, one of feeling and one of intention. Two people who took to each other immediately — friendship and rom...

Grow old together; lifelong partnership

Literal: White heads together in old age

White (白) heads (头) reaching old age (老) side by side (偕). The Book of Songs supplies the wish — 及尔偕老, to grow old with you — and the white hair was added later to give it a picture. It is a blessing rather than a description: nobody says it about a marriage in progress. It is said at weddings and a...

Love at first sight

Literal: One glance, feelings concentrate

At a single (一) sight (见), the feeling (情) gathers (钟). 钟 is the interesting character. Simplified Chinese has merged two of them, and the one here is 鍾, a wine vessel whose extended sense is to gather or concentrate — not 鐘, the bell. So what is described is the whole of somebody's affection collec...