Paradoxical story: Parents `invite each other` to play on dating apps, all because their children are so bad at it! 9
Parents go on dating apps
Since February last year, Wang Xiangmei, a retired worker in Zhejiang, China, has used three different dating apps to find the perfect husband – not for herself but for her daughter.
On the applications, Wang, 52 years old, set detailed requirements for the future son-in-law: he must have a bachelor’s degree, be at least 1m73 tall, be 33 years old or younger, and come from a family of teachers.
Wang believes that her daughter urgently needs a boyfriend before all the good men in the world are snatched up by other women.
She also explained that her daughter should give birth while she was still healthy to help take care of her grandchildren.
Chinese parents like Wang are turning to a series of new online parental matchmaking platforms to help their unmarried children.
On apps like Perfect In-Laws, Family-building Matchmaking and Parents Matchmaking, parents create profiles to advertise their children to potential spouses, sometimes without their consent.
Although arranged marriages in China as well as in many other countries today are no longer as common as before, the marriage rate has decreased in recent years, making parents too impatient, wanting to
China’s dating app industry has tapped into this anxiety by offering online matchmaking services.
Parents found the matchmaking app through ads on the Douyin app, the domestic version of TikTok.
For example, a basic subscription on the Perfect In-Laws app costs 1,299 yuan (about 4.3 million VND).
It’s unclear how many parents participate in these dating apps.
Parents Matchmaking, launched by online dating giant Zhenai.com in 2021, also boasts a user base in the millions.
Compared with dating apps aimed at young people, such as Tinder or Momo, China’s largest dating platform, new matchmaking apps for parents pay more attention to the target’s finances.
Information such as salary, car and property ownership, and place of employment (public or private sector) are displayed prominently on user profiles.
Generation gap
Sybil Wu was less than happy with her mother’s enthusiasm in the matchmaking.
At first, she just played the app for fun, but soon realized she could find someone for her daughter, a postgraduate student in Beijing.
After finding her future in-laws, Wu’s mother called to discuss her children’s career plans and exchanged photos on the messaging app WeChat.
Some parents asked her mother whether Wu had attended top high schools.
She said she texted with a man her mother found through the app, but the relationship failed.
This conflict over matchmaking apps shows the growing gap between how young people and their parents view marriage.
Kailing Xie, an expert at the University of Birmingham who studies marriage and gender in China, said that because young Chinese often rely on their parents’ help to settle down and start a career, parents want to ensure
`Children’s work is also parents’ work because children are the family’s only hope,` Xie said.
But parents and children sometimes have different expectations about what marriage brings.
In contrast to their parents’ generation, young people, especially women born in the 1990s and 2000s, tend to choose to marry later.
Elaine Yang, the daughter of Wang Xiangmei, the character at the beginning of the story, is now a teacher in Hangzhou city, said she sometimes argues with her mother on the phone because she constantly pressures her to get married.
Yang said that although she sympathizes with the social pressure her mother endured having an unmarried daughter, for now, she is happy with her single life.
Despite Yang’s objections, her mother is planning to sign up for matchmaking apps and make plans to meet.
