Why this word is great
ZOUHUN — [Noun] A visiting relationship or informal marriage system, particularly among the Mosuo people, where partners do not cohabit but the man visits the woman at night, each remaining anchored within their maternal household. From Mandarin 走婚 (zǒuhūn), composed of 走 (zǒu, "to walk") and 婚 (hūn, "marriage"), hence literally "walking marriage." Unlike marriage, which implies a formal, cohabiting merger of lives, or matrilocality, which still prescribes a shared home with the wife's kin, zouhun is a pact of deliberate separation, a social architecture built not through merger but through recurring, nocturnal pilgrimage. It is the quiet footfall on a moonlit path, the unlatched door at dusk, and the morning return to a household wholly one's own—a delicate proof that the deepest bonds are sometimes those woven from absence and return.