STAYING SINGLE
PAGE 5 of 5
"When you're in your 20s, women have the upper hand in dating," says Lin. "That changes in your 30s."
|
"I can freeze my eggs and hatch them when I'm 50 or 60. I can have a surrogate do it for me. All I have to do is buy some sperm." |
The culprit is the reproductive time bomb of female biology, the fear that if a woman doesn't start a family by her mid-30s she'll never have a chance. For some, it means entering questionable marriages just to acquire a feeling of family and security. For others, it means plunging into the dating scene with a sense of desperation, and feeling a new kind of pressure that has nothing to do with social acceptance. For Chang, it means changing her priorities.
"At some point, people have got to make a decision that finding a mate is a top priority, or else they never will," Chang says. "It's definitely moving up the ladder of my priorities."
Only Boswell, as usual, is nonchalant when asked about the biological clock.
"I can freeze my eggs and hatch them when I'm 50 or 60," she says. "I can have a surrogate do it for me. All I have to do is buy some sperm."
Under Pressure
n Caucasian families, it's usually women who feel the most pressure to
get married. American men are encouraged to play the field and sow their
wild oats before taking the plunge, while women are often pushed to settle
down and start a family.
In Asian families, though, it's often the reverse.
"It used to be that the first question my relatives asked me was how I
was doing in school," Derek Lin says. "Now it's, 'Do you have a girlfriend
yet?'"
Hermie Lee has a brother and sister, both 35, who are fraternal twins.
Her brother is married, while her sister is still single. She says her parents
really don't seem to mind that she and her sister haven't found mates, but
they were constantly setting up dates for her brother until he finally married
one.
The reason, Lee says, has to do with the patrimonial makeup of Korean
families. When a woman is married, she enters her husband's family and
often loses contact with her own parents and siblings. In many Korean
family trees, when a daughter is married her name is simply crossed off the
list.
This custom isn't unique to Korea; patrimonial lineages are traditional in
most Asian countries. So it's little wonder that Asian parents are sometimes
less anxious to lose their daughters than they are to see their sons marry and
produce grandchildren. These feelings often remain even though the parents
have moved to America, where daughters aren't encouraged to leave their
families behind after they marry.
Not that Asian women don't feel considerable pressure too; for Lee, it hits home when Korean relatives come to visit and immediately ask whether she's married yet. "That really makes me angry," she says. "I have to stop and think and realize that, for them, it's not a rude question."
For deVera, as well, the pressure comes mainly from peers rather than parents. Most of her friends from high school are now married, and married people often see single people as an aberration, a deviation from the norm that should be corrected if possible.
For Boswell--well, Boswell doesn' really know the meaning of the word "pressure."
"I just don't respect relationships," she says. "I think you need to have very healthy people psychologically and economically for it to work." An entire generation of Asians seem to agree.
CONTACT US
|
ADVERTISING INFO
© 1996-2013 Asian Media Group Inc
No part of the contents of this site may be reproduced without prior written permission.