Translator's note: Douban is a major Chinese social-media and review platform; Weibo is China's equivalent of Twitter/X. "Xiangqin" refers to introduced, marriage-minded dating—rendered below as "matchmaking" or "blind dates."
It was probably right after I graduated last year. I saw a comment under someone's Weibo post saying Douban had a group where a lot of people went looking for matches, and out of curiosity I came to Douban and searched for "matchmaking."
There were plenty of region-based matchmaking groups, but most of the posts were obvious scams at a glance, and the rest looked like they'd been planted by matchmaking agencies. It felt like Gresham's law had run its full course—the bad money had completely driven out the good—and there was nothing of value left.
But then I found this group. At least at first glance, it was real people sharing real feelings, which I found fascinating. I lurked here for a long time, and below I'll set out my observations and my advice.
Of course, going by my observations—and by people's instinctive reaction to negative feedback—I know that however objective and fair I try to be, plenty of people will still tear me to shreds. That's fine. I'll accept any criticism that comes with sound reasoning behind it.
First, a bit about myself. I'm describing my own situation so you'll know that I can only represent one slice of the male population: my views are representative of something, but they're also one-sided. If the kind of person you're hoping to meet is someone like me, then at least you'll know how this segment of men sees you. I mean absolutely nothing condescending by this. Everyone is part of society, and no one can truly stop caring what others think of them. Rebutting me with something like "I don't care in the slightest what you think of us" is, to my mind, pointless—unless you intend to hole up at home for the rest of your life, never going out and never engaging with the world.
Now, on to what I've observed here:
- The double standards in this community run deep.
Personally, I've always held that marriage genuinely involves a weighing and trading of interests, alongside that most basic and ordinary feeling—attraction between the sexes. Both are there, but the former dominates (because the pressure just to get by in today's society really is immense, and it's hard not to run the economic math on marriage). So when women here complain that a guy is stingy, or ask the group to help them judge which of two prospects is worth pursuing, I think that's perfectly normal. What astonished me was this: I recall a guy this month posting the very same kind of thing—asking the group to help him weigh which of two women he was seeing to choose. He was instantly buried under a flood of accusations, and even outright abuse and personal attacks. People said he was treating women like objects, accused him of vicious cynicism for worrying that a woman might betray him, and cursed him to be cuckolded down the road. This double standard makes men's views extremely hard to come by in this community, and makes any quality discussion almost impossible.
- I've been through plenty of failures over the course of my life, and the biggest lesson I've taken from them is this: the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one.
I mean no personal attack by this, but I find that many of the women in this community, when they analyze why their dates fall through or why they get no dates at all, have no habit whatsoever of starting the argument from themselves. Among the active posters here, some have photos on their profile pages—and a fairly large proportion of those women have looks that fall below average (if "good-looking or not" is too subjective, then let's put it this way: poor facial symmetry, no hairstyle suited to their face shape, uneven skin tone, no look of health and vitality). And in romantic dealings between men and women, a woman's sexual attractiveness—how good-looking she is—accounts for 90% of what matters. So for most people in this group, the reason they can't find a match, or can't get one to keep seeing them after the first meeting, is, I'd argue, 90% this. Once you admit this is the cause, a great many of the discussions become unnecessary (for example, the people who keep posting chat screenshots asking, "Did I say something wrong? What does this guy mean?"). My view is that you should first assess your own looks objectively, then gauge whether someone lost interest in you because of your looks; only once you've ruled that out does discussing the other possibilities become far more productive. The two crucial points here: assess your own looks objectively, and be willing to push through the discomfort and admit that you're at a serious disadvantage where looks are concerned.
- Many people go into these dates with no shared premises and no empathy.
Here's the simplest example: many people hold that on a first date, the man should cover most—if not all—of the bill. Leave aside for now whether that view is reasonable; assume it rests on a consensus rooted in Chinese (indeed Asian) social custom and culture. If so, then women ought, in turn, to summon the empathy to understand why so many men want to know, "Are you willing—and able—to take on a larger share of the housework?"—because that, too, is a fixed pattern of thinking handed down to us by tradition. Any discussion should proceed on the basis of established common ground. If everyone agrees that "certain inherited practices—the man paying more, the woman doing more housework—are unreasonable, yet are in fact widely accepted," then to expect the man to pay while flying into a rage at the man's notion that you should do more housework after marriage is, frankly, deeply selfish.
- Many people refuse to admit that everyone is supposed to both give and receive in a marriage.
There's a line of thinking going around these days—things like "Work hard, girls, or you'll end up married," or "Thanks for not wanting me; I don't need anyone to want me anyway," or "I'm financially independent, so I don't care whether the man I date has money." The way I see it, men and women come to the marriage market wanting completely different things from the very start. A man is after someone good-looking whose personality clicks with his (most of the time, qualities like gentleness, empathy, not being lazy), while what a man can offer is, more often than not, economic capacity (a stable income, the use of property, and so on). So for a woman who isn't good-looking, the optimal strategy is to improve what she can improve (personality, diligence, learning to project a bit of sexual appeal). This has nothing to do with feminism or the lack of it—if you want to win the game, you should understand what your opponent wants. The same goes for men: a man who wants to win the game will do everything he can to meet his counterpart's demands (provide a stable income, provide the use of property). Many of the women here, first, won't admit that they aren't competitive on "looks," the single biggest demand of all; and then they cast the male demands beyond "looks" as "male chauvinism," reading a man's wish to see their photos as "lecherous" and "tasteless." And what they end up complaining about is that there's no suitable person for them to date or marry. It's like showing up to a poker game with a set of mahjong tiles and then complaining that nobody will play poker with you.
- Most people are unwilling to compromise.
Because the dating market, too, is an open, fair market with rapid price discovery (meaning you won't get into a relationship only to discover the person was secretly a knockout, or a closet tycoon, all along). By analogy to trading, the matchmaking process goes like this: in the best case, your looks are high enough that people are forever chasing after you; next best is dating in the wild, where some fraction of the people you cross paths with are drawn to your qualities (cuteness, erudition, gentleness) and pair off with you; and last comes the arranged date (a third party brokering the trade between the two of you). So, given that most of the women here sit at the worst trading stage—whether for subjective reasons or objective ones—the most important thing is to admit the facts: at the stage you're at, the prospects you meet are most likely the "crooked melons and cracked dates" (a Chinese idiom for unattractive, "defective" people—the runts of the crop) in your eyes, and you are most likely the "crooked melon or cracked date" in theirs. Only by admitting this can you better play to your strengths and steer clear of your weaknesses. And once you admit it, the answer to all those "why can't I get a relationship?" laments turns out to be glaringly obvious: you've been playing the game with a strategy that doesn't suit you.
- At this point, I know many will object that calling marriage and love a "transaction" is vulgar and crude.
But in discussing any problem, the first thing to do is to conceptualize and abstract it. Surely some people have found, in these arranged meetings, a love that counts no costs; surely there are couples mismatched on every measure who go on to wonderfully happy, fulfilling marriages. But rebutting with isolated cases is utterly pointless. What we're talking about is the great majority of ordinary people. Your luck is ordinary, the resources you hold are ordinary, your aim in the dating market is ordinary (to find someone easy on the eyes to throw your lot in with)—you very probably fall within the category of the ordinary, so your problem can very probably be analyzed and solved in conceptualized, abstract terms, can't it?
Rational discussion is welcome. But coming in just to vent emotion, hurl insults, and slap on labels will, in my view, never once help you solve your own problems.