Visas and Chinese Online Dating

My latest blog discussed a Chinese woman who had a great interest in coming to the U.S.; perhaps too great an interest, for it became clear to me that my willingness to move back to the U.S. and get her a visa was a make or break part of our relationship. I chose the break part, and in my blog I speculate that perhaps I made the wrong choice. But there is a larger issue here, namely, that most men who are doing Chinese online dating might think that this sort of behavior is par for the course. I don’t want to say this never happens, for as my case shows it does indeed. Also, if you read some of the blogs on ChinaLoveMatch.net, you will find pretty much every Westerner writing a blog has come across this sort of situation. But it can no way be considered the norm and would probably even be called the exception.

The old stereotype of foreign women fleeing a failed homeland to miscreant males rightly spurned by members of the fairer sex in their own country simply does not apply anymore in my experience. Instead, the women on Chinese dating websites are in their twenties, thirties and forties, less than thrilled with the choices available to them at home and flocking to other markets, emboldened, as it were, by their country’s rising prospects to enhance their own. So my guess is that you will probably face quite a different dilemma; you may want to return to the States, or wherever your homeland is, and the Chinese woman desperately desires to remain in China.

First, you really can’t blame her; it is her homeland. Second, she is probably her parent’s only child and so—because this is China—she feels a great responsibility for taking care of them. The connection to the family is in my opinion so much tighter in China that it is hard for Westerners to realize how difficult it is for a Chinese woman to move away from her own country. Third, she has probably never traveled outside of her own province much less outside China, so the very prospect scares the hell out of her, as it should any sane person. We in the West, especially in America, tend to be rather free spirits who can pick up and move at will; we are a transient nation. Not so China, where the emphasis is on staying put and raising a family. So when it comes down to it, the visa bride is probably a situation most of you will not have to confront on Chinese dating websites, although—as my experience shows—you should be prepared for it and come to terms with how you feel about it.