Hi Liuliu, First of all, many thanks to you for taking timing to read, and reply to, my post. I really did not expect you, the most famous author of the best sellers, would actually be kind enough to reply.
Today I went to a trade show in Washington DC with my colleague, a young man from India. The drive was about an hour, so we started chatting in the car. Turns out that he is going back to India in May to get married. This is a typical family arranged marriage still popular in India, as his fiancé has been a long time family friend. This leads me to think that not that long ago, marriages in China were also arranged. If we judge the success and quality of marriage by the divorce rate, then I would say that arranged marriages appear to be superior to love-based marriages.
The foundation of arranged marriage consists of compatibility of social status, monetary status, social class of both the gloom and the bride families. These tend to be quite stable qualities that last through generations.
The idea of marriages based on love is very appealing on paper. But the reality is that our love changes, sometimes rather quickly and dramatically over time. The average love lasts perhaps 7 years? Some last as short as just a few months. Another problem of love is that some men think they have enough love to spare for more than one woman – some women think this way too.
These days, in China in particular, the love that marriages are based on, has been slowing changing from pure love to “material love”, which leads to the phenomenon of mistresses and “second wives”. Therefore our society has evolved from arranged marriage to love-based marriage to material-love-based marriage. I am not sure it is progress at all. What do you think?