Dating in China

Dating in China is becoming more complicated as society opens up and gender dynamics change. Women have more economic independence, but the one-child policy means parents put them under more pressure to marry and set higher standards for son-in-laws. City parents are slightly more likely to want a daughter than a son so they can stick the potential husband's parents with the start up costs of their daughters' marriage (many parents won't consider a son-in-law who can't buy a house, and in China that's a huge expense, especially for younger men; it's a common joke in China to refer to being a slave to your house payments).  The same parents who tell their kids not to date until after graduating from college (to focus on their studies) then soon after graduation start pestering their kids about "where's your b/f//g/f?"  I could go on about how parents are probably the number one reason for their kids' divorces, but I digress.

As a westerner, I probably wasn't going to be set up with a girl by her parents (which is a very common method when parents see their daughter in her late-twenties and yet no grandkids), and I can't read the Internet postings, so the most common ways to meet young women were bars and English corners.  The Chinese women in bars are usually looking for a western lifestyle, but since I never liked the taste of alcohol or smoky environments, that fertile scene (based upon other western men's stories anyway) wasn't for me.

The women I met in English corners took a more traditional approach towards dating, by which I mean dating was a process of getting to know each other, and the "third date rule" was for holding hands. When my college students (mostly female) asked me if I dated much, I dodged by asking them what a "date" was in China, and their playbook was right out of the American fifties. A date might be anything a man and woman did without other people, from going to the movies ("because in it's in the dark and anything can happen") to a dinner to a walk in the park. So I conceded to my students that by Chinese standards, I dated a lot, but not so often by American ones (which seems to be something Americans do after sex now, and I've often warned my Chinese students about to go abroad about the general dishonesty of the American dating scene). And all that dating was a great excuse to go to restaurants and let them order the dishes, so I ate a wider variety of food than I might have based upon my limited Chinese ('going Dutch' is a popular English phrase in China).

While I enjoyed the company of many Chinese women, ultimately I failed the 'seriousness' test so there was only so far the relationships would progress. Sooner or later, they would ask me where I wanted to spend the rest of my life, and the correct answer was their hometown (so they could watch after their parents). I'd admit my life was too mobile to answer the question, and I'd be back to friendship status. Many of my college students decided not to date until they returned to their hometown to avoid inevitable argument between in-laws about where their kids would live.

One of the more interesting parts of talking with so many women in China was that they felt they could talk to me about things they couldn't talk with their Chinese friends about. They could talk to me about Tibet, Taiwan, or the historical context of Chinese international relations and what exactly is democracy anyway? And even more often, they would talk with me about relationships, since most of them knew I was divorced (a highly educational experience). I know a divorced person discussing marriage with a single person could be a one-eyed man leading the blind, but I also grow up with parents who are still married, so I did the best I could.