My sister and I are very alike in a lot of ways but when it comes to ‘love’ we could not be more different. For me, love is caring for and having respect for someone ‘unconditionally’, and should have nothing to do with money. For my sister however, love and money go hand in hand, and our diverging views on the subject, have naturally led to a few heated discussions!
Although according to a recent online survey on Chinese attitudes towards love and marriage, it certainly seems that my views that money should not influence love in anyway, are a minority, as the majority share my sister’s view that the amount of money a person earns is an important factor in deciding if someone is ‘worthy’ of becoming a partner.
The survey was jointly conducted by the China Association of Social Workers and the dating and matchmaking website, Baihe.com. It polled more than 50,000 people, aged between 20 – 60, across the whole of China, and found that almost 80 percent of its female respondents said that men earning less than 4,000 Yuan ($635) a month should not start a relationship.
More than a quarter of the women who had participated in the survey had said that they expected to date men who earned a monthly salary of at least 4,000 Yuan. Only six percent of the female respondents said that they did not care about a man’s financial status.
Now I understand that the living costs in China, as in most countries, have risen sharply in recent years, but so, unfortunately has unemployment. Surely in today’s financial climate, where urban unemployment in China was last reported at 4.1 percent in the third quarter of 2011, where in the UK the unemployment rate reported in October of 2011 was at 8.3 percent, and in the US in December of last year unemployment was reported at 8.5 percent, condemning a man as being an unworthy boyfriend prospect for failing to have secured himself a well-paid job, is surely going to empty the sea of a whole lot of fish!
For me, men, as well as women for that matter, who prove they are willing to provide for their family, even if that means taking a low paid job, are a lot more commendable than some high-flying smart boy in a suit who refuses any job unless it comes with a six-figure pay packet – No wonder dating websites such as Baihe.com are becoming so popular with singletons harbouring such stringent financial policies when searching for a potential partner!
The kind of women who regard a man’s financial status as being a prime factor to whether or not they are marriage material, are likely to be the type of women who would attempt to ‘fleece’ a man for ‘every penny’ in the wake of a divorce.
There was a new law inaugurated in China, which came into effect in August last year, that stipulates that premarital property is viewed as the personal property of the registered owner, not the married couple’s joint estate.
Personally, I am in favour of such a law, as there is nothing I find more infuriating than women – and unfortunately it usually is women – who, when getting a divorce, aim to receive half and sometimes even more of their ex-husband’s fortunes, even if they contributed nothing towards those fortunes, either before or during their marriage.
My suspicions that many of the women who seek a ‘financially secure’ husband are likely to consider themselves as joint owners of their husband’s estate, were in actual fact proven correct as, according to the survey, 40 percent of female respondents said they would require their names to be added to the certificate of real estate property ownership if it were bought by a man before the marriage.
And what happened to women’s liberty? Increasingly women are earning more money than men and it is the men who are staying at home and bringing up the family.
Doesn’t a woman ‘insisting’ that a man has a more successful and better paid job than herself, make a mockery of the women’s equality the Suffragettes spent years trying to achieve?
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