Shanghai Street View: Misguided Matchmaking

With the Double Eleven shopping binge now in the past, many of Shanghai’s singles are moving their sights to the upcoming Chinese New Year when they’ll have to face the barrage of questions about their love lives from friends and relatives. Sensing an opportunity to play on the upcoming anxiety, our city is preparing to hold the latest edition of its semi-annual matchmaking event next month to give singles something to talk about in response to their grillings at home.
The aptly named Shanghai Matchmaking Association wasted no time turning on its publicity machine after November 11 Singles Day, issuing a barrage of data on outcomes for people who have attended its 5 events dating back to 2011. The only problem is that the numbers don’t look all that impressive, probably because many people attend these events out of desperation and guilt rather than any real desire to find love.

The matchmaking industry is undergoing constant changes in China, and there really doesn’t seem to be any easy answer for finding love in this current age of rapid change. I could facetiously suggest a return to the time-tested forced “introduction” system, which worked well for the last few centuries in China and yielded very high success rates. But such systems are rapidly breaking down in an era where singles can easily stay financially independent for their entire lives, removing one of the major pressures for finding a long-term partner and starting a family.

At the end of the day, Shanghai could probably do a far better matchmaking job by setting up more western-style activity-oriented clubs aimed at bringing people with similar interests together in group situations. Such settings allow people to get to know each other without the pressures of a one-on-one relationship, and also increase the likelihood of finding someone with common interests.

That kind of approach might help to boost the Matchmaking Association’s success rate, which looked quite dismal according to its own figures. In a bid to drum up interest for the sixth Shanghai Love and Marriage Fair, set for December 20-21, the association published data that showed some 216 couples went on to get married after meeting at its events.

But then the association also admitted that almost 200,000 singles have attended the 5 mass gatherings so far. A little math will show that 432 people got married after meeting a partner at the event, translating to a success rate of just 0.2 percent. I’m not a business genius, but even I can say that any company with such a low success rate wouldn’t be able to stay open for long.

Additional figures from the association don’t look much better. Only 7-10 percent of people who attended the events said they met someone there they planned to see again. The association tried to defend the low success rates by saying real numbers may be higher since some couples don’t like to admit they met through matchmaking services.

The association has also taken some steps over the years to try and boost its success rates. It now charges fees for parents to attend, aiming to remove these anxious elders whose presence often adds to anxiety and lowers chances for relaxed conversation. The upcoming event will also feature a first-time specific area for women teachers and nurses, after organizers noticed a large number of women from those groups were still single after 30.

I can remember a time not long ago when success rates for matchmakers were far better than today. Those were the years when matchmakers were mostly elder family members or friends who made “introductions”, putting huge pressure on young singles to couple and eventually marry. Not realizing the implications, I had the misfortune of becoming “introduced” once during my years in Beijing in the 1980s, and spent the next few months politely finding ways to distance myself from the young musician who was nice enough but not really my cup of tea.

Those kinds of introductions are becoming far less common these days, especially in big cities like Shanghai where singles feel less pressure and often find excuses to avoid such meetings. The upcoming Marriage Fair is an attempt by the city to fill the vacuum, but I honestly think it may be time to cancel this mass event if its success rates are really so low.

At the end of the day, this kind of large-scale gathering really isn’t very conducive to finding partners, as it’s quite impersonal and rushed. Instead, the western-style approach of bringing people with common interests together in longer-term group situations would probably have a far higher rate of success.

Of course it’s too late to cancel the upcoming December Marriage Fair, which will no doubt be accompanied by the usual flood of media reports and other publicity. But perhaps the city might consider a change of strategy in 2015, with an eye to bringing back some fun to the courtship process and reducing the pressures and anxieties that many singles now feel when looking for a mate.