Focus

Simply fabulous but still single

By Zhao Yanrong (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-26 07:53

30-year-old Du Hanqi is beautiful, intelligent woman and has a successful career as a psychologist. However, her single-woman status has brought her many concerns.

Career, family and men behaving badly ruin many a relationship, but that doesn't mean a woman has to stop searching

To many women Du Hanqi has an enviable life. She is beautiful and intelligent; has a successful career as a psychologist and has a quality lifestyle. But no matter how big her achievements, she feels that there is still one thing missing - a partner.

"I wish to have someone to share my life with. Sometime, it's tough to live alone in the city," Du, a 30-year-old psychologist, told METRO.

Even as a little girl, Du always stood out and her excellence meant she was never short of suitors.

Du said her first boyfriend was a nice, sweet person, very attentive. But love alone was not enough to satisfy the then 21-year-old Du. "I loved him, but the life he preferred was not what I wanted," Du said. "I wanted to continue my studies overseas and explore the world more. But he was more inclined to settle down after graduation and preferred a stable life."

In the end the relationship finished when she boarded a flight to the UK and left the first love in her life behind. "If it happened now, I might try to compromise a little bit to keep the relationship. But I won't give up my dream and career," she said.

The next love in Du's life was a Chinese student she met when she was studying in the UK. But this time, the man was eight years younger than her.

"We could still feel the pressure from my parents, his parents and our friends, even though we were far away from them," Du said.

Her young lover also told her to ignore the disapproval coming from China. However, Du started hesitating when her parents kept questioning her about the future of the relationship. Finally, she ended the relationship when she came back to China in 2007.

"It's tough trying to maintain a long distance relationship, especially since our relationship was not blessed from the very beginning," she said.

Once she was back in Beijing, Du's parents and many of her relatives started introducing her to men, but she found it hard to find strong feelings for them.

Simply fabulous but still single

"I found Chinese men had changed a lot after I came back from overseas. I feel they lack any commitment to a marriage or relationship," she said.

As a psychologist, she listened to many stories of husbands cheating on their wives, or about men having affairs with many women to maintain a macho image.

"Chinese men prefer women who are easily controlled by them. I think they are less interested in me, not because I am not good enough, but because they are afraid they will not be able to control me, or in other words, to make me do as they say."

But even though she knows any future relationship will require a solid foundation in realism, she still dreams of the fairytale romance.

"I could be very successful woman in my career. But in real life, I am just a normal girl who wants to find a man I can relay on," she said.

Du Hanqi's criteria for a potential partner:

Personality: Smart, preferably smarter than me;

Financial ability: Making more money than me;

Family background: From a family full of love and no divorce history;

Height: Taller than 170cm.