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                                Choosing a Spouse

    If you are young and unmarried, you must have in your mind the image of an ideal husband or wife. Most young people like to indulge in fantasies, and your image may ta.ke the form of a certain famous film star or pop singer. But if you are of a practical turn of mind; your "ideal" would be more down to earth, and your "image" would be modelled after what you see around you. Though images do not always coincide with realities (for after all, an ideal is an ideal), it is nevertheless an interesting subject for study, for it tells us what the young people expect from the present society.

    Dr. Li Yinhe of the Sociological Institute of Beijing University has made a study of a certain amount of matrimonial advertisements, and he found that the present generation of China put great emphasis on, in order of importance, (1) age, (2) height, (3) education as the three most important standards in choosing a spouse. Next comes (4) character and temperament, (5) profession, (6) marital status and personal history, (7) appearance and (8) health.

    Such order of emphasis is peculiarly Chinese. Other conditions such as religion, race and love, so important to people of other nations are completely missing in Dr. Li,s list. Many foreign scholars are also interested in the Chinese idea of an ideal spouse and they just can't understand why the Chinese men especially set so much store by "age" when they choose a spouse. A man of over forty would want a woman under thirty and a man of thirty would want his future spouse to be under twenty- five. One possible explanation is that youth is almost synonymous with beauty. At least the two words young and beautiful always go together. The Chinese people have not yet discovered mature beauty.

    Height definitely is uniquely Chinese in playing such an important role when people choose a spouse. To be eligible a man has to be at least 1.70m. in height. It is said that to a choosy girl, any man under 1. 70m. is considered a semiinvalid! So far no one has offered a satisfactory explanation to such a strange phenomenon.

    As to the third important condition, that of educational level, people find it a puzzle too, because in present day China education doesn't give you high social status, nor does it bring you good pay. Yet both sexes set a great store by it. The thing to notice is that a man with a university education is content to have a wife with senior middle school education while a woman with a university education would never consider a man with only a senior middle school education: Her husband has to be at least a university graduate too, preferably someone with a post-graduate degree.