Voices
Give it all up for a man? Maybe it makes sense
By Huang Yuli (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-05-25 08:05
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An old college classmate of mine called me up last week and asked me to dinner.
We hadn't seen each other for a long time.
During the previous two years, she had pursued a master's degree in our college and I somehow had wandered around the career world.
During the dinner, I learned that she had been in love for two months with a guy who was an expat in France.
They got to know each other through a relative and began to chat on the Internet. The two haven't met each other so far.
So, I was totally surprised when she told me marriage and kids were on her mind.
She was not that kind of person, as far as I remembered. I had always seen her as a superwoman: she was the best in our class, won the first-class scholarship every semester, and was called the "walking dictionary" by us - a great compliment for a foreign language student.
She became a postgraduate without an examination.
I was even more surprised when she told me she would probably give up her plans to become a university professor and adjust her job according to her man.
A career is not the most important thing for me now, she said.
Why do women throw things away that mean a lot to them so easily for a man? Is marriage so important that women are perfectly happy to make room for the man's success?
She reminded me of a Chinese woman I met in Berlin, a 34-year-old housewife. Her husband was a PhD in Humboldt University on a full scholarship. The woman herself had a master's degree in psychology from a prestigious university but she had never worked because she had been accompanying her husband while he studied abroad, making meals - washing clothes and cleaning their home.
I felt it was really pathetic that such a good brain was being wasted, until I was invited to dinner at their home and saw how sweet the couple was. They communicated with each other without one single barrier; the tenderness they shared was genuinely to be envied. And at that moment, I understood the reason why she was so content with her life.
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A friend once said a boyfriend who gets you through times when you have no money is better than money that helps get you through times with no boyfriend.
That sounded perfectly reasonable.
In this indifferent modern society, a living person by your side is much more valuable than the numbers in your bank account.
Maybe all a woman wants is a simple place that makes her feel safe and peaceful; a job can never provide such warm feelings with all the competition and deadlines.
A man, a responsible guy, however, could make it happen.
And maybe marriage is the perfect moment to get away from it all and go for Alice's Wonderland. Compared to men, women are lucky to have a choice.