There’s a joke I like to tell my parents whenever they ask me why I haven’t yet found a boyfriend. Well, to call it a “joke” would be a stretch. It’s more of an observation, really: it’s that for the first 20-odd years of my life, my mom refused to let me to date. Relationships, she explained, would only distract me from my studies and thus ruin my career prospects. But then I graduated, and literally one day later—parked in a loading zone outside Hong Kong Supermarket, a large grocery store in the heart of New York’s Chinatown—my mom asked me if I might start dating soon.

“You can date now, you know? It’s time,” she told me in the gentlest of tones, her concerned eyes peering into mine. She looked at me like I was a baby rabbit that had wandered its way out of a hole in the ground. “Are there any boys you like? Do any of them like you?”

At the time, her prodding didn’t really bother me. I was just out of college, career-driven, and naively convinced I could use my charm to leverage a friends-with-benefits situation into a relationship. Now that I’m a few years older and still very much single, however, my mom has grown increasingly more anxious for me to meet someone. Someone intelligent and refined with financial stability. Someone who’d be able to take care of me. Though I know her concern comes from a place of love, I wish she could see that I’m capable of taking care of myself. More than anything, I wish she could see how much work it took for me to get to this point of financial and emotional independence. Despite my many attempts to reassure my parents that I’m doing just fine, I can hear the anticipation in their voices whenever they inquire about my dating life.

This is my own experience as a 20-something Chinese American woman, but it’s true that the pressure to marry can be painfully real among women everywhere. In China, for example, the pressure to settle down can be so pervasive that many single women are reluctant to visit their families during the Lunar New Year. Instead of it being a happy occasion, going home for the holidays has become a stressful ordeal. “Meet Me Halfway,” a moving video by the prestige skincare brand SK-II, spotlights three young women who have been avoiding going home for the new year because of such pressure. “When I go home, it’s no longer about reunion,” mall planner Duan Yu Li says in the video. “It’s only about marriage, marriage, marriage.”

The parents of the women also share their reasons for being so fixated on marriage for their daughters in the video. “Her biggest problem is that she’s too independent,” says Duan Yu’s father. “Women shouldn’t work so hard. It’s exhausting for a girl,” says the mother of Yang Yang, who lives in Shanghai. It’s similar to conversations Melanie, 26, a Boston native and Asian American who works in advertising, has had with her parents.

Melanie told me she recently broke off a four-year relationship largely because her parents had been pushing her to get married. “My ex-boyfriend is Asian. He has a good head on his shoulders. He's handsome. I think my parents really wanted me to settle down so they didn't have to worry about whether or not I'm going to be taken care of,” Melanie explains. But she says she isn’t ready to tie the knot. To her, settling down now would mean prioritizing a partner over her job. “I have so many other things that I want to accomplish in my career,” she said. “I don’t want to put myself second to anyone because my family or my friends are pressuring me to get married.”

Ruchi, 32, a New York-based woman who works in education technology, is no stranger to that stress either. She told me that her mother began broaching the topic of marriage two years ago. “I think my mom gets very worried because I'm a woman, and I'm her last baby who’s unmarried,” says Ruchi. As an Indian-American woman, Ruchi says she must contend not only with her culture’s expectation for her to find a husband but also to start a family. In addition, according to her, there’s a cultural implication among Indian women that “if you're not married by a certain age … your options are very limited.”

But nowadays, women in the United States have more options than ever, according to journalist Rebecca Traister, who examined the rise of unwedded American women in her 2016 book All the Single Ladies . “Now, thanks to a lot of the political battles that were waged in the mid-20th century ... women have much more opportunity to earn on their own. Though we're still not close to equal pay, women can be economically independent,” Traister told NPR . “Thanks to the sexual liberation, thanks to developments within birth control, thanks to an expansion of reproductive rights, women can have sexually liberated lives.” As a result, many women, like Melanie and Ruchi, are choosing to prioritize their careers over marriage and family planning.

“When I was in grade school, I thought that I was going to be married by 23, have my first kid at 26. I had a whole plan ready,” Melanie says. “But as I'm getting older—as I'm realizing that I really do love my job—I'm starting to come to terms with the fact that I'm OK if I don't get married until later.”

Like women across the United States, a new generation of Chinese women are also breaking away from cultural norms and choosing singlehood in lieu of marriage. “I really hope to have a family too, but I’m not ready to be a wife yet,” radio DJ Lin Yan says in the video. “There are other things I want to accomplish first.” And although the expectation for women to marry is still deeply embedded in modern society, perhaps with time a woman’s choice to embrace singledom will not be so stigmatized.

That’s the hope of “Meet Me Halfway.” In it, the three young women—Yang Yang, Duan Yu Li, and Lin Yan—write letters to their parents, taking the brave first steps to meet them halfway, figuratively (by understanding their perspectives) and literally (in a location halfway between their and their parents’ homes). When the daughters and parents reunite, they eventually arrive at an understanding, with both sides promising to try to see from the other’s perspective. That each daughter-parent pair must make an effort to communicate their wants and needs is an important reminder that marriage pressure, no matter how motivated by love, can have real consequences in a family.

The last time my mother tried to broach the topic of relationships and marriage with me, I shut down the conversation the only way I knew how to end a fight with my equally headstrong mom: by reverting to a childlike state, clamping my hands over my ears, and yelling over her until she eventually sighed and walked away. For days, I resented her. Why couldn’t she see and acknowledge the woman I’ve worked so hard to become? Why does she cling to the myth that there is a “one-size-fits-all recipe" to happiness and one that means having a spouse and offspring?

To say that I no longer get upset with my mom would be a lie. But as time passes, I see now that, to a degree, my mom is merely reacting to standards she’s been raised to believe. And thanks to this video, I have come to appreciate the reason why she may be pressuring me—because she worries so much about my wellbeing. I’ve never been good with confrontation, but perhaps with some time, I’ll be able be able to summon up the guts to take that first step and communicate my needs to my mother. Hopefully, she’ll see that my being single is a choice she can respect.