"After listening to the blind date analyst, I decided not to get married"

New Weekly

2024-06-01 11:03Published on the official account of Guangdong New Weekly

Author | Xu Zheng

Edit | Felicia

  Title Picture | Anna

Since April this year, this type of blogger has appeared intensively on social platforms, known as "blind date analysts". They dissected the blind dates sent by the audience, found landmines, and explained why "this person can't be married". In just one month, these blind date analysts can easily amass more than 400,000 followers.

This made the MCN agency see the oil and water. The advertisement for the recruitment of a blind date analyst reads, "I don't want rich experience, I just want to pass the test in Mandarin, and the monthly salary is 1 to 40,000 yuan."

Their approach to analysis is a bit like coping with an exam: first review the questions, and then emphasize "don't look at what he says, look at what he doesn't say."

If you don't mention your weight, you're fat; Only say BBA (the three major luxury cars in Germany), not to mention BMW, Mercedes-Benz, then it is most likely Audi. The analysts then refined the conditions and followed the vine to find the melons - those who do business, basically tobacco and alcohol come; If you live with your parents, it means that you are divorced and have a baby; If you have a car and no house, you can't run and you're a sea king.

In the end, the formula is indispensable - "low five minus four". For example, people who claim to be 184cm correspond to the "low five", which is usually only 180cm; And 170cm corresponds to "minus four", remove 4cm, and the answer is 166cm. Extrapolating the height downwards, relatively, the age is extrapolating upwards, "33 years old this year, which means that he is at least 34 years old, or even more than 35 years old." For three years of blind date, you have to take at least five years of simulation.

Marriage and love agents couldn't imagine that the bowl of rice on a blind date suddenly became sought-after from the opposite direction. Debunking the decency you write on the database is a small victory.

Give the known conditions and ask how to arrive at "this man can't marry/this woman can't marry". (Photo/@九叔来支招)

Who deserves to be in a relationship?

Seeing the essence through the phenomenon and keeping full suspicion of the "good conditions" listed by each stranger is the daily work of a blind date analyst.

For example, "27 years old, have a Porsche, are ready to open a hospital, parents retire, and buy an independent marriage house after marriage", from these five conditions, there must be something greasy in it. Parents retired at a young age? It shows that he was born in a rural area, and his parents are either farmers or unemployed. The words "independence after marriage" reveal that the current situation is very likely to be shared with his parents, with a need to bring a baby, and divorced. Packaging himself with a Porsche, which is neither Cayenne nor Palamella, is most likely looking for someone to take over and invest in a hospital that he has not yet opened. The above dismantling is completed, and the perfect closed loop.

From the perspective of avoiding pitfalls, there seems to be nothing wrong with the analyst's job: guess the worst direction first, and avoid the impulse to pounce on the air. But after watching more than a dozen videos, I still faintly feel that something is wrong. Because, this backward logic is too easy to copy.

When I left school, I still had to listen to the teacher knock on the blackboard, mark the key points, and memorize formulas. (Photo/@旺旺表弟)

When encountering the same case, different analysts will say almost the same sentence, "Doing business is ushered in, and the wine and wealth are not separated", "The thin person whose parents discipline him strictly, is likely to have depression", "It is impossible for a serious man to study the constellation", and even the evidence provided is the same set of words, "The customer said, it is indeed more than 200 catties", "It was confirmed later, there are two daughters", which is similar to the truth of wholesale.

Believe it or not, or secondly, after all, someone can help point out the flaws, and it is also a way to get married calmly. However, these rhetoric, which is getting lower and lower in marginal utility, is gradually drawn into prison. Use clichés to dismantle routines, and the result is that you fall into a new routine.

In this large-scale teaching, the stigmatization of income, the discrimination of academic qualifications, and the stigmatization of single-parent families are all blatant.

If you have children and are divorced, there must be problems with your character; Only the undergraduate is marked, and there is a high probability that it is two books or college upgrades; is 31 years old, with a monthly income of only 6,000 yuan, and his ability is too poor; Both parents are high school teachers, the chicken baby atmosphere is serious, and the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is tense ninety percent; Only talking about the unit and not the occupation is about the same as contract workers, intermediaries, and outsourcing...... All of this is combined into a clear Chinese-style chain of blind date contempt.

Rejecting low diplomas, believing in meritocracy, income, occupation, car, house, and bride price all reflect "have you worked hard over the years", confining the divorced group in a stereotype, not welcoming the elderly, and even specifically not welcoming "entrepreneurs" and "doing engineering".

"At most, it's a junior college, maybe you haven't graduated from high school yet", the implication is that everyone who understands it. (Photo/@军师无念)

It's understandable that there is a personal preference when choosing a mate, but blind date analysts have accelerated it into a so-called broad consensus, and it's highly standardized. As soon as the conditions at the bottom of the contempt chain appear, the anchor and the barrage will have an unprecedented tacit understanding, and the conclusion does not need to be deliberately clarified at all, because, "everyone who understands understands".

"Society" is sometimes used as an adjective like "shrewd" to describe a person's ability to discern pitfalls that most people don't see. The blind date analyst competition is "who is more social", they stand in front of the blackboard and draw in circles, deduce an authoritative subject, unilaterally output knowledge points, and preach to "not so social" people, "You think it is a high-quality stock, but in fact, no one wants it in your hands, naïve!" It's easy to fall into the pit! ”

In order to explain these pits, everyone began to calculate and work backwards rigorously, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it, "to assemble the object of love from a large number of measurable physiological and social attributes." A few points will be deducted from the height, a few points will be made up for the family background, a few points will be subtracted from the academic qualifications, and a few points will be added to the household registration...... The matter of choosing a mate is finally trimmed into several conditions, and you have to align with each other to see if you are "worthy or not".

On October 11, 2022, the blind date corner in Chengdu People's Park. (Photo/Visual China)

From this point of view, the blind date contains action, not feelings, as if it is a market behavior, only allowed to earn, and no one can afford to lose. The sentence "Can this man/woman marry/marry" on the blind date analyst's small blackboard is more like asking "will investing in this man/woman make money or lose money". In order to protect your own class, it is best to go up in courtship, not down.

Putting people on the shelves and waiting for the price to sell is not unfamiliar to contemporary blind date men and women.

I'm afraid of marriage, but I can't help but talk about marriage

A wise man does not fall in love, and if he has to do, he must analyze seriously and calculate wisely. According to the 2022 China Statistical Yearbook, there were about 240 million single people over the age of 15 in China in 2021. People would rather be single and wait on the blind date market for a long time than rush to ask for a high-risk partner.

The "high risk" here is not only about being deceived at the economic level, but also about life, feelings, and dignity.

Many times, people stay in the blind date stage because the other party's poor level of conversation makes the "marriage" thing seem unprecedentedly funny. "Look at whether my brother is handsome or not", "No one touches the newly trained abdominal muscles", "From the moment I wake up, my day starts thinking about you"...... These statements are confusing and resemble a plausible form of sexual harassment. On social media, there are cases of people who bow down because of blind dates every day.

The rise of feminist topics has made the injustices that have been buried in some marriages for a long time, such as housework, emotional labor, language bullying and other facts, no longer hidden, and it is difficult for men with strong patriarchal social habits to be trusted quickly.

(Photo/Stills from "Kim Ji-young Born in 82")

Going further, social news reports have long since penetrated what a person can hide more deeply than blind date analysts. The word "intimacy" becomes ironic, and everyone sees that it has the potential to mutate into betrayal or even brutality. "Fear of marriage" is not just a buzzword, it is formed behind one case after another about domestic violence, murder, and the gaslighting effect.

The "siege" in Qian Zhongshu's mouth is becoming more and more specific in people's hearts, and the number of marriage registrations in 2022 has fallen below the lowest level since 1986, with only 6.835 million couples. However, the discussion of marriage has not diminished. The attitude towards this matter is that they want to take a step away from it, but they also want to talk about it in depth. The blowout love variety show set up cameras for hundreds of thousands of viewers, from before marriage, married to after divorce.

Filtering the TV series in the "love", "marriage" and "family" categories on search engines is so abundant that the titles are about to overlap. From the early "Chinese-style Divorce", "Wang Gui and Anna", "The Age of Naked Marriage", "Marriage Defense", "Double-sided Tape", to today's "Thirty Only" and "The First Half of My Life", there are always thousands of gullies waiting to be traced in marriage, which are inexplicable and unclear, but still paradoxically attractive.

(Photo/Stills from "Chinese-Style Divorce")

There is no way to define marriage by a crude dichotomy, such as cheating is absolutely bad, or divorce is some degree of failure. It's so complicated that we can't conclude that free love is inherently more wonderful than a coldly calculated blind date.

In the article "The Death of My Wife", which went viral some time ago, a husband who graduated from the law department of Peking University commemorated his wife with a eulogy of more than 5,000 words. Just like praising his mother for being "great" in the traditional context, he praised her for being "smart", "diligent", "serious" and "not afraid of hardship", these words have become the essence of a good wife, not only for the sake of the family, but also for the family to apply again, take exams, study, go abroad, and give birth to children in a boarding house. In the midst of his pain and mourning, onlookers can still recognize the wife's sacrifice.

For onlookers, this is not higher than a marriage that weighs the other party's family background in advance and is tough.

After the increase in followers, blind date analysts began to build a paid learning group. (Photo/@军师无念)

It's not very unusual to pretend to be in love with calculations, so there is an industry like a certain treasure love brain scolding awakener. Spending a little money is to avoid losing other things in love, and the blind date analysts, marriage and love live broadcast rooms, Douban persuasion groups, etc., derived from this are just people's urgent and primitive self-help impulses after falling into too many pits.

The question is, can blind date analysts really avoid harm for the public?

The Greek philosopher Lushin said that man "pledges his fate" to the beloved. This is a very romantic sentence, but if you think about it carefully, the word "mortgage" is also a word that has changed from economic activities, which is equivalent to a person who understands that there are a lot of variables in the other person before the mortgage and complete delivery, but this "variable" does not depend on the "hardware" that the blind date analyst highlighted with chalk.

(Photo/Stills from "If You Are Honest, Do Not Disturb")

The decisive factor is never the car, house, savings, height, or education, but the complex human nature and the "people" in social relations. This complexity may have caused poor conditions or superior chips on the small blackboard, but we have no position to judge a "person" in 3 minutes, just as a high degree does not mean absolute integrity, and a monthly income of 5,000 yuan may not determine who is unproductive.

Hiding from specific hardware conditions, where to hide from hypocrisy, greed, jealousy, and complaining? Is it even love to hide together?

In fact, we may be afraid of marriage, but we are not yet to the point where we are willing to fall into the rigid evaluation path and give up screening a living lover.

Proofreading: Meet

Operations: Ono

Typography: Sweet

[1] "The First Sword on the Shore, the First Kill the Intended One": Individualism Defeats Love?.Interface Culture,2022-09-25.

[2] Blind dates in defense of class: what you want to hold on to may be exactly what you are losing. Interface Culture,2017-07-18.

[3] Bauman, Haffner. Turn the familiar into the unfamiliar. Nanjing University Press, 2023.

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