How BaZi Days ranks a wedding date

1. Birth Profiles

BaZi (八字), also known as the Four Pillars, is a traditional Chinese system that represents birth information through Year, Month, Day, and Hour pillars. Each pillar contains a Heavenly Stem and an Earthly Branch. Together these describe a person's natal structure.

For wedding date selection, the relevant pillars are:

• Year Pillar — broader annual influences.
• Month Pillar — seasonal context at birth.
• Day Pillar / Spouse Palace — the most directly relevant pillar for marriage timing.
• Hour Pillar — included when birth time is known, for a more complete profile.

2. Hard Exclusions

Some candidate dates are removed before ranking even begins. A date is excluded if it carries a major personal conflict or a major calendar exclusion.

3. Personal Structural Interactions

For each candidate date that passes the hard exclusions, BaZi Days checks the date's Earthly Branch against both partners' BaZi profiles for structural interactions:

• Clash (冲): major clashes with either partner's Day Branch or key pillars can exclude a date entirely (hard exclusion). Lesser clashes may reduce the personal compatibility score without rejecting the date.
• Punishment (刑) and Harm (害): negative structural interactions that may reduce a date's personal compatibility score. Severe cases can result in exclusion.
• Six Harmony (六合): may contribute positively to personal compatibility. It is treated as a supporting interaction rather than proof that a date is inherently auspicious.
• Three Harmony (三合): when a candidate date completes a relevant Three Harmony structure, it may contribute positively to the personal compatibility assessment. It is not treated as automatically favorable in every chart.

Negative structural conflicts carry more weight than positive combination bonuses.

4. Traditional Wedding Calendar

Each candidate date is also evaluated through traditional Chinese date-selection (Ze Ri, 择日) principles:

• Marriage suitability (宜嫁娶): whether the day is traditionally designated as suitable for marriage.
• Major calendar exclusions: days that carry significant negative associations are filtered out.
• Twelve Day Officers (十二值日): the day's officer quality — for example, 成 (Complete) is favorable for marriage.
• 28 Mansions (二十八宿): the lunar mansion associated with the day and its traditional suitability.
• Selected traditional indicators: additional almanac factors where relevant.

5. Ranking

The two layers are combined into a single Match Score:

Dates are then ranked from highest to lowest Match Score. Each date in the results includes a breakdown showing how it scored in both layers, so you can see exactly why a date ranks where it does.

6. Missing Birth Time

When birth time is unknown, the Hour Pillar is simply omitted from the analysis. The date score is not penalized simply because information is missing — the calculation proceeds with the Year, Month, and Day pillars, which are the most relevant pillars for wedding date selection.

7. What Wedding V1 Does Not Use

Wedding V1 does not use the following as direct numerical scoring inputs:

• Yong Shen (用神) / Xi Shen (喜神) — favorable and joyful element identification.
• Ten Gods (十神) — relationship archetypes derived from stem interactions.
• Favorable-element interpretation — school-dependent elemental balancing approaches.

Interpretation of these concepts can vary significantly among BaZi schools and practitioners. BaZi Days initially prioritizes more deterministic and explainable structural rules — clashes, punishments, harms, and harmonies — that produce consistent, transparent results.

8. Limitations

BaZi date selection is a traditional cultural practice rooted in Chinese metaphysics. It is not a scientific method and does not guarantee any particular outcome. The Match Score is a comparative ranking within the BaZi Days methodology, not a probability of marriage success. A happy marriage depends on mutual respect, communication, commitment, and many other factors that no date selection system can account for.