Chinese dating, relationships, and marriage have become a
constant battle between modern daughters (and even sons) of China and their
more traditional parents. Most Chinese
parents still possess traditional attitudes toward marriage and impose these on
their children; most Chinese women have a more contemporary, perhaps even a
westernized, outlook and cannot understand the lengths their parents go to in
order to get them hitched.
Round One
It all starts during their teenage years when their parents
expressly forbid their daughters from dating and having relationships. Even when they get to their college years,
most parents do not want their daughters to interact with the opposite sex in
any other way than academically.
Since many of these girls come from single-child families,
they are expected to be the breadwinner as soon as they finish college; this
means they are also expected to excel in their studies to ensure that they will
get a decent-paying job later. Dating
and relationships are distractions that their daughters do not need.
As a result, these Chinese girls do not learn anything nor
gain any experience about how to interact with the
opposite sex, start and
maintain a relationship, and go about figuring out what they want in a partner
and what their goals are with regards to marriage and starting a family.
Round Two
By the time these young women graduate from college, they've
reached marrying age. While their
parents want them to start earning money for the family, they also start
pressuring them to find a husband to marry.
In fact, the pressure to get married and have children does
not let up until they finally do so. The
longer their daughters stay single, the more the parents worry and the more
they become actively involved in finding a mate for their dear children. In fact, some start playing matchmaker as
soon as their daughters come of age.
Many of these young women, however, do not want to rush into
marriage just because their time is running out, at least according to
traditional marriage customs. Some want
to focus on their careers first; others want to wait until they find the right
one and gain some dating/relationship experience along the way. There are even those who do not mind being
single and actually enjoy the single life.
Round Three
Around their daughters’25th year, parents,
especially mothers, start panicking if their daughters still aren’t
married. It’s even worse if these young
women haven’t even had a single boyfriend.
Then again, it’s just as frustrating for their parents when their
daughters do date and have relationships but are not showing any signs of
settling down any time soon.
So the parents get more aggressive with their matchmaking
activities. They attend matchmaking
events to hand out their daughters’ “resume” and exchange information with
other parents. They set up blind dates
for their daughters with men whom they found through
these matchmaking events or through family friends.
Many parents even go online to search for
potential partners for daughters who do not seem to care at all that their time
is running out fast.
The parents’ involvement only intensifies as their daughters
reach their 30s still single. The
nagging never lets up; the blind dates become more frequent. For every failed matchmaking attempt, the
parents get increasingly frustrated, disappointed, and worried.
The women, on the other hand, also feel increasingly
frustrated and annoyed at their parents’ constant worrying and nagging, and
even more so about the never-ending blind dates they are forced to go to. Many of these women, however, want to make
their own dating and relationship choices, especially with regards to choosing
when to get married. Unlike their
parents, they do not worry at all about each year passing by without them
having any serious marriage prospects.
Some do not see anything wrong with being single in their 30s.
Standoff
The problem, clearly, is a complete difference in
attitudes. Chinese parents only care
about their daughters finding a man with whom they are compatible in terms of
education, career, and family background; modern Chinese women, on the other
hand, feel that “feelings” are just as important, if not more so, than the
traditional and more practical standards of choosing a partner.
Most parents can also become so focused on following
traditional norms and expecting their children to do the same that they fail to
realize the modern realities that their daughters also have to face and adapt to. Indeed, traditional Chinese marriage
attitudes, more often than not, can no longer co-exist with the demands of
modern Chinese society. Chinese women
and their parents need to communicate more so they can understand each other’s
motivations and, perhaps, find a middle ground.
Discover tons of great information about Chinese women and Chinese dating
on the blogs, magazine
and forum of ChinaLoveMatch.net (the home of trusted Chinese dating),
where international men and Chinese women share their life experiences and bare
their souls to give you the real goods on love, cross-cultural relationships,
and all things Chinese.
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