“I will never tell my parents that my boyfriend and I met via a dating app,” said Alisa, a Japanese girl in her early twenties who currently works in New York.
Alisa is one of the interviewees I talked to for a news story about New York-based Asian millennials’ attitude towards online dating. She’s not the only one who’s concerned about telling her parents her online dating experiences.
“People in Japan generally don’t consider online dating decent, especially if you are a girl,” she said.
So do many people in China.
That whether dating apps are trustworthy deserves another discussion. For this moment, I’m more intrigued by why those people I interviewed–those millennials seeking education or career development in a foreign country, choose a way of life that’s not necessarily encouraged in their home country. If the cultural upbringing (all of my interviewees were born and raised up in Asia) suggests online dating is a bad thing to do, what makes them act against the culture? Do they truly accept their own lifestyles? If so, why are they hesitate about telling their families or peers?
None of them were able to address these questions directly. It’s just something you find hard to share with your parents, and even with your friends sometimes, they said. My observation informs me that some of them are conscious of others’ judgement over their using the apps (people either consider them desperate or unserious about relationships), but they simply don’t care and don’t bother debating over it. If your friend judges you based on that, what kind of friend is that, right?
Interestingly, among the four people that I talked to, three of them were introduced to dating apps by their American friends. To their American friends, online dating is just one of the many ways to meet new people and start a relationship. I realize during my research and interviewing process that the longer a person lives in the U.S. (as a foreigner growing up in China or Japan), the more likely he/she is to accept meeting someone via online dating. Why?
A possible reason is that the American society is built upon trust, and most of its citizens believe in it. Don’t get me wrong–I’m not saying the Japanese or Chinese society is not built upon trust, but that the levels of mutual trust between two strangers are definitely very different between the West and the East. Because of that, as you are getting more accustomed to the way Americans interact with one another, you’re more likely to trust other people than initiating dubious questions about them when you met. The rule applies to online dating. And that explains why, in general, online dating is more popular in Europe and the Americas than in Asia.
The other possible reason is that the young generations are more open-minded. They grew up with the Internet, with foreign TV shows and western pop culture clashing with their own so that they’ve always had a more adventurous mindset than the older generations. That mindset encourages them to try new things. In this case, online dating is obviously one of these things. It might not be new (in fact, China’s online dating scene can be traced back to as early as 2003), but it’s challenged by traditional beliefs. A sidenote: Jiayuan.com (official website of Shi Ji Jia Yuan, a Nasdaq-listed company based in China) has a tagline that reads “China’s biggest serious online dating website.” That the word “serious” is in that line deserves a knowing smile.
In the end, there’s nothing wrong with online dating, and there’s nothing wrong with either culture. It takes time for new ideas and new way of life to get passed to the next generation and get celebrated. But along the way, we need to know what is curbing the development so that we don’t just complain or scold, but learn to understand and support. I wish the older generation would join the process of understanding so that their kids don’t have to hide anything from them anymore in the future.
(Featured image: courtesy of Jeremymast.com)