Marriage–housing as intimate infrastructure: Vital conjunctures in urban Chongqing, China

Across urban China and other settings where property is tethered to marriageability, access to housing has become a key condition for union formation and family timing. We reconceptualise marriage–housing (hunfang) as intimate infrastructure organised through vital conjunctures, socially structured zones of possibility in which obligations, debt, hukou and gendered moralities are negotiated under uncertainty. Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews and participant observation at Chongqing’s People’s Park matchmaking corner, we trace how futures are made and unmade under overlapping constraints. We identify four conjunctural mechanisms: conditional marriageability tied to homeownership; refusal of patrilocal co-residence and strategic delay by women seeking post-marital autonomy; intergenerational bargaining and asset reallocation across kin; and affective withdrawal and non-marriage as default under prolonged insecurity. These mechanisms re-pattern life-course timing and couple-level expectations through mortgage stretch and debt duration, peri-urban new-build purchase and commute trade-offs, and public rental housing (PRH) as a holding pattern. Conceptually, we integrate relational and moral geographies with the vital conjunctures lens to show how uncertainty, indecision and ‘absent possibilities’ shape housing–marriage trajectories. We move beyond framing marriage–housing as a single market driver and trace how intimate infrastructure and land–finance arrangements are linked in ways that vary by place, cohort and policy, outlining implications for secure rental, PRH design and support for intergenerationally entangled households.