STAYING SINGLE
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     "The moment you start, everyone is in on the dating process," Lin says. "It's sort of a communal version of Love Connection."

"The power relationships between single men and women start to shift as one gets older."

     Even people like Lee, who was born in the U.S. of two very cosmopolitan parents who place little pressure on her to conform to cultural values, say the arranged marriage tradition is so powerful among Koreans that a person almost feels guilty about dating on her own.
     "To go out and meet people, and be really deliberate about it, really sort of goes against a cultural grain," she says.
     If there's one good thing to be said about Asian parents, it's that the older their sons and daughters get, the less picky they seem to become about who their kids bring home.
     "My parents have gotten pretty desperate now, so I think they'd be happy just to see me get married to anybody regardless of race," Lin says. His sentiments were echoed by four other men and women we interviewed.

thnicity is only part of the equation. For many single people, no matter what race, finding Mr or Ms Right is a process of experiment, indecision, analysis and procrastination. While some have powerful enough convictions to leap into marriage after a few months of dating, others spend years agonizing over the decision.
     "To go beyond dating and make a decision to marry is quite a task," says Kris Aoyama, 44, a partner with the executive search firm Heidrick and Struggles. "You don't want to do it lightly, because it's a lifelong decision."
     Aoyama waited until the age of 40 before tying the knot. Because his job takes him all over the world (he's lived in six countries), finding a woman who could keep up with him has been a serious challenge. It wasn't until he met a Caucasian American woman living in Tokyo that he found someone sufficiently cosmopolitan to fit his lifestyle.


     The reasons people today have trouble making decisions might be, as Lee says, because there are more choices. Or maybe Robert Apker has the answer when he says that people live longer these days, so they don't feel as much pressure to marry and bear children early. Or maybe they're simply becoming more self-indulgent and intolerant of other peoples' foibles, like Aeliot Boswell:
     "I haven't found anyone I want to bother getting married to, and I find that a melange of different people are more interesting than one person--not that I'm getting horizontal with them," she says. "When you don't need to look for financial subsidy, you don't need to be looking all the time. Women today have more choices, and the stigma of not being married doesn't really exist as it did before."
     One thing several of the men and women we interviewed commented about is that somehow the power relationships between single men and women start to shift as one gets older. PAGE 5

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