Market for love

Along the cobbled sidewalks surrounding Zhongshan Park in Beijing, vendors hawk their wares: hand-squeezed orange juice, ice-cold water bottles, umbrellas to block the sun. Inside the park, which stretches along the moat of the Forbidden City, elderly men and women also set up shop. What do they proudly offer? On laminated pieces of paper, their children or grandchildren.

“Female, never married, born in 1976, 163 cm tall, college graduate, good-natured,” reads one. “Looking for a responsible man who is 172 cm or taller.” At the bottom: a phone number.

On one sticky Sunday afternoon, a tall young man cracking roasted watermelon seeds eyes an ad that includes a headshot of a cute 20-something. “What about her?” he asks the middle-aged woman seated on a bench nearby.

“For yourself or for someone else?” she asks.

When he says for himself, she launches into a barrage of interview questions. “Do you own an apartment? Do you have Beijing residency? Which school did you graduate from?” As his answers fail to meet her expectations, her smile slowly fades. Finally she asks what year he was born. “1990,” he responds, and she shakes her head: “Oh, you’re too young. … Sorry, that won’t work.”

Marriage markets like the one in Zhongshan Park have popped up in big cities all over China as parents and grandparents fret over finding a mate for their only child or grandchild. Most ads include the man or woman’s age, height, and income, traits that Chinese millennials value in a potential suitor. These young people are caught between two competing views of marriage. On the one hand, parents place enormous pressure on their offspring to marry and have children once they graduate college in order to continue the family line. On the other, Chinese youth face the same secular trends as the rest of the world—promiscuity and cohabitation, delayed marriage, and higher rates of divorce.

The tug of war still leans toward traditional views, yet for young Christians the situation is even more complicated: First-generation believers are learning about the biblical meaning of marriage and the necessity of marrying a fellow Christian, which often puts them at odds with their matchmaking parents. The pressure is greatest for women, as churches tend to be majority female, with many struggling to find a mature Christian man.

BEFORE CONFESSING CHRIST, 34-year-old Lily Huang’s criteria in finding a husband was similar to those of many of her friends: She wanted a wealthy, handsome man with an impressive resumé and a personality that radiated like the sun. Growing up, her parents forbade her from dating—a common rule in Chinese households—because it might distract her from studying hard and getting accepted into a good college. As an obedient child, Huang stayed out of trouble at her all-girls boarding school even as classmates snuck off campus to go on dates.

For many young Chinese, Hollywood movies and Korean soap operas inform their view of love, sex, and marriage. In schools, embarrassed teachers gloss over sex education, a topic that falls through the cracks in China’s “teach to the test” educational system. One Chinese woman told me she didn’t learn where babies came from until she was 17 years old. Parents also don’t talk to their children about relationships or the purpose of marriage, so Huang learned about love by reading romance novels (secretly) as a teen.

‘I’m not searching for love. I’m waiting for love.’

—Huang

Once students enter college, parents and teachers typically allow dating but don’t offer guidance. It’s no longer unusual for college-aged women to live with their boyfriends, become pregnant, and abort the baby all before graduation. Huang stayed single during her college years, but soon after graduation started dating a co-worker seven years her senior. “At that time, no one had taught me how to love another person, so we both hurt each other,” Huang remembers. “We didn’t know what it meant to love; we were just trying to satisfy our own needs and desires.” The two began to argue more and more frequently, and eventually broke up after three years together. Huang was devastated.

At first her parents gave her space to grieve, but once they saw Huang hadn’t found a new boyfriend, they started setting her up with the children of friends and acquaintances. They frequently reminded her: “You must find a boyfriend. He doesn’t need to be anything special; as long as he treats you well, he’ll do.” None of the suitors lasted more than a few dates, as Huang continually compared them with her ex-boyfriend.

Family reunions over Chinese New Year became unbearable for Huang as grandparents, aunts, and uncles pestered her to bring home a boyfriend. “In Chinese people’s eyes, unmarried women over 25 are not well-received,” Huang said. “My relatives often say, ‘If you don’t get married soon, you’ll be past your prime … then you’ll be unmarketable, an unwanted product.’” Sheng nu, or leftover women, is the derogatory term for unwed women over the age of 27.

WHILE PARENTS IN CHINA are adamantly against dating before college, once their children graduate and enter the working world, they expect them to have a serious boyfriend or girlfriend, to wed, and to produce an heir. Yet China’s gender imbalance makes that difficult. Under the Communist nation’s one-child policy, parents often aborted or abandoned their baby girls in order to keep trying for a boy. The Chinese government estimates that by 2020 there will be a surplus of 30 million unmarried men in China. Hence the marriage markets in parks all over China, parental setups, dating websites, and even a dating service for wealthy men. (The dating service sends out teams to various cities to scout for an eligible mate—first by appearance, then by a rigorous interview process.) Some desperate parents even kidnap young girls and raise them as future wives for their sons.

Yet step inside a church and you’ll see the opposite imbalance: There, the pews are often filled with women, their voices lifted in worship, heads bent in prayer, hands clasped on leather-bound Bibles. It’s not uncommon to see women preaching from the pulpit, since many churches lack strong Christian men. This situation causes difficulty for first-generation Christian women as they balance respecting their parents’ desire for them to find a husband quickly with the biblical call to be equally yoked in their relationship and date only Christian men.

Huang’s life and view on marriage started to change in 2008 when a co-worker told her about the gospel. Soon she began attending a church, and the pastor baptized her a year later. The transformation took some time, Huang remembers, as Jesus did not immediately become a priority in her life, or in her love life. She found the men at church boring and intimidating, constantly quoting Bible verses. In contrast, the men she met outside of church were charismatic, better-looking, and worked higher-paying jobs.

As she got more involved at church, Huang began to view more aspects of her life through the lens of the Bible. She realized she wanted a man who put God first in his life and could lead her spiritually. “I realized that Jesus loves me deeply, and He must be hurt by how much I love the world. I needed to love what He loved, so I prayed that I’d find the man God has in store for me.”

Now older Christian couples model to Huang what a healthy Christian marriage looks like, honestly sharing their difficulties but also how they overcome them with Christ in their relationship. Huang and a few other single women recently read the translated version of The Meaning of Marriage by Tim Keller. It’s drastically changed her view of marriage, she said. Now she realizes the importance of first getting to know someone as a friend before seeing if love develops.

But her new perspective hasn’t sat well with her parents, who felt offended that Huang rejected their setups. Conflicted, Huang spoke with her pastor’s wife about what she should do—respect her parents and go meet the suitor, or hold firm on her insistence that it would be a waste of time since he was not a Christian. Over time, Huang became more resolved to tell her parents politely that she would date only Christians: No matter how great this guy was, she would not meet him.

It’s a universal issue among single first-generation Christians. The singles group at Huang’s church, Chengdu Early Rain Reformed, even set up a formal debate last spring on the question of whether Christians should attend these non-Christian setups. Four people argued they would go to honor their parents and try to use the situation as an evangelism opportunity, noting that one meeting did not mean they would necessarily date or get married. The other side argued that by not attending, they could clearly show their parents their conviction and not lead on either a suitor or parents.

Huang has also faced opposition from friends who think she has foolishly limited her prospects. Even though her church has a more even proportion of men to women, Huang’s friends have reminded her she is still single seven years after joining the church. “How will you ever find a Christian husband?” they ask.

But Huang says she is learning to find joy in Christ amid her singleness.

“I’m not searching for love,” she tells her friends. “I’m waiting for love. I know God will give me the man He has chosen for me. And if God decides He wants me to be single, then I’ll stay single.”