A wealthy husband
The Singles Care Society's Liu Yi-chun has been matchmaking for 15 years. In recent years, she's noticed that the number of women joining dating services has increased several times more rapidly than the number of men. "Most are nurses or beauticians," she says, "because all their coworkers are women, and because the night shifts they work keep them from socializing." According to Liu, if these women hit the age of 32 without a prospective partner by their sides, alarm bells begin to ring and they join a dating service.
Women of relatively low socioeconomic standing have joined these services en masse, and are "processed" pretty quickly. The oldest members of these services are instead almost all highly educated women with high incomes. These professors and PhDs gave their youths to books. It was only after they had completed their degrees and found stable work that they suddenly realized the importance of socializing. But time waits for no one, and age is the cruelest of realities.
"Many of the men looking for wives," says Liu, "just toss aside the personal information of women who are older than themselves!"
According to Liu, even though there are very advanced beauty treatments available today that can "lock in" a woman's youthful appearance, biological aging remains a fact that causes potentially suitable men to hesitate. "While older women marrying younger men may be fashionable overseas," says Liu, "it's still thought of as taboo in Taiwan." Society is prone to mocking women in such relationships for "keeping a boy toy." Liu thinks that the high opinion that "three highs" women tend to have of themselves makes them reluctant to give such relationships a try.
A woman's level of education can also be an obstacle. When highly educated women who haven't found a good partner in graduate school enter the working world or academia, they find that the only men in this new setting are either married colleagues or young students. The traditional male superiority complex is also a problem--few men are willing to become involved with a woman who is more highly educated than themselves. Such women become all too familiar with how lonely it is at the top!
Parents all too often encourage their daughters from childhood to study hard, to not focus on their dress and appearance, and to avoid having too many or the "wrong kind" of boyfriends, without telling them of the potentially serious lifelong consequences of focusing so exclusively on their studies.
Chang Mei (not her real name), a pretty woman who teaches at a prestigious university in northern Taiwan, is a typical example. She holds a PhD from an American university and has already been teaching for seven years. The dual pressures of teaching and publishing are running her ragged, but it is the voice inside her head constantly asking, "Where is my soul mate?" that really makes her frantic.
Chang, a devout Buddhist who believes in karma and transmigration of the soul, often drags her friends with her to see a medium who is reputed to be a skilled fortuneteller. On several recent visits, this medium had solemnly averred that she would soon meet the man for her. Now her friends have taken to teasing her because, in spite of her enthusiastic participation singles-club activities, she has yet to meet anyone at all.
On the eve of her 40th birthday, Chang again dragged a friend with her to have her fortune told. On looking at her birth date and time, the medium changed her tune, this time averring, "No, you aren't fated to marry in this life. You don't want me to lie to you, right?" The words were like a bolt from the blue, and Chang burst into tears on the spot. She said she hadn't done any harm to anyone in this life, and only wanted a family of her own. Why, she asked herself, was this so hard? Crushed by this disappointment, she has begun to doubt herself. "What," she wonders, "is my purpose in this life?"