[Editor's note]:
Year after year, the way of celebrating the Spring Festival is also changing again and again. Since when has there been a new solution to the family dilemma of "going back to your house for the New Year or going back to my house for the New Year", and since when has the social relationship during the Spring Festival been quietly reconstructed...... Year after year, the unchanging Spring Festival continues to witness new phenomena, give birth to new professions, and bring new feelings. China News Network launched the "New Illustrated Book for the Spring Festival" to record the changes in the customs of the year and freeze the changes in China.
Chinanews.com, Beijing, February 14 (Wei Xianghui) Efficiency may be the key word for contemporary young people to go on a blind date. The Spring Festival coincides with the peak of blind dates, and some young people have decided to use this as an opportunity to expand the base to increase the success rate. At the same time, matchmaking mechanisms and standards are changing.
Data map: The blind date profile hanging in a "blind date corner" in Dashu Mountain Forest Park in Hefei City attracted people to stop. Photo by Han Suyuan
Turn on group sending mode
During the Spring Festival, Li Lin and her friends went to the surrounding scenic spots, she took some scenic photos and shared them with one of her friends, and then clicked "Forward one by one", and these messages were transmitted to other friends at the same time.
A total of three people received these landscape photos, and they were all blind dates that Li Lin was considering. The 26-year-old works as a teacher in a public primary school, and has met nearly 10 blind dates since the beginning of the year, most of them on the recommendation of relatives, friends and colleagues.
According to her, a blind date is an efficient way to solve personal problems. The so-called high efficiency is to first take a criterion to do screening. She made a very interesting analogy, "It's like an exam, everyone first does the same paper, and if you score less than 60, you will directly fail, and if you score more than 60, you will enter the next stage." As a result, the response of those blind dates became the answer sheets handed over, and Li Lin was both the one who produced the papers and the ones who read them.
is slightly different from Li Lin's direct group sending mode, Shen Yang will make some changes to the content of the message, but it is also sent to different blind dates. "Blind dates may be in groups, and you have to be one-on-one when you fall in love. Shen Yang is now chatting with five girls, two of whom met through games, and three of whom were also introduced by relatives.
Shen Yang said, "Blind dates are originally a small probability event, and expanding the base is to some extent to improve the success rate, or to make yourself not frustrated by failure in one person, and you can directly find the next one."
Data map: A citizen uses his mobile phone to shoot the "looking for fate" message. Photo by Han Suyuan
Meet a rare "normal person"
The Spring Festival is the peak period for blind dates. "What kind of blind date you meet may determine the mood of the New Year. Li Lin expressed her recent views on blind dates. She said that before the meeting, the person who introduced the two parties had already matched the situation, and the meeting was just to further confirm whether it was true or not, and the important thing was to see if they could really talk together.
"If you meet a normal person who can communicate and communicate normally with you in the blind date market, don't let go, because there is a high probability that you will not be able to meet someone more normal than him in the future. "One blogger got a lot of attention for sharing his thoughts on blind dates on social media. The video received 84,000 likes and 28,000 comments.
In the blogger's opinion, "If a person has a good family, work, and emotional intelligence, he can find a partner on his own." Some of the people who can't find a partner are because they have a small circle and can't meet suitable normal people, and some of them have some obvious shortcomings, such as poor height, scary weight or poor emotional intelligence."
From a broad perspective, it may be difficult to judge what is normal according to traditional perceptions. An important shift is that relationships are increasingly being discussed from an economic perspective.
In the field of family sociology, scholars have proposed the concept of the "marriage market", in which a man and a woman establish a relationship based on certain criteria for marriage, including exchange, complementarity or trade-off.
Compared with love, blind date is indeed a relationship construction process that is more rational than emotional, but in the face of intimacy that cannot be forced, group communication will still be tested. "I still have to feel like a call. Li Lin said.
Data map: Many people are looking for a suitable partner for their children or themselves in the "blind date corner". Photo by Han Suyuan
Invisible rulers
In the process of blind date, the family conditions and parental concepts of both parties are often an important criterion for matching, so that parents can check first and even some young people accept the premise of a blind date. Shen Yang said that he prefers blind dates introduced by relatives, "at least knowing the roots".
Since June 2019, Ji Yingchun, a professor at the School of Sociology at Shanghai University, and his team members have recruited 42 parents of their children for interviews at the Blind Date Corner in People's Park. The study found that an invisible "glass ruler" lies across the blind date process of young people, marked with a gender scale, that is, income, work and education.
Recently, Ji Yingchun said in an interview with the media that the acceptance of the woman's parents to not marry in the survey was much higher than that of the man's parents. There are a lot of structural factors at play here, and from the perspective of the woman's parents, they are more willing to pursue a more inclusive marriage for their children that emphasizes personal happiness. Even after marriage, the woman's parents are more receptive to Dink, while the man's parents are very persistent in childbearing, and only a few of the man's parents can accept Dink.
"Parents of both men and women have different attitudes, motivations and considerations about sexual norms and marital concepts. This loosening is unbalanced, asymmetrical, and in fact a mixture of traditional and modern. This has led to a conflict of perceptions between the two sides centered on the concept of gender equality, which may be an important cultural mechanism for the postponement of the age of first marriage and the increase in the rate of non-marriage and even divorce. ”
Ji Yingchun believes that from a social point of view, for the sake of family stability and marital happiness, gender equality should be promoted in the whole society, men should be encouraged to participate in and promote the process of gender equality, and a new type of marriage and childbearing culture of gender equality should be promoted. (ENDS)