Twilight love: China’s lonely and retired are looking for love

For Shanghai’s lonely and retired, love is elusive. Divorced or widowed residents gather in a dating corner in People’s Park every weekend looking for a chat. They mill about an Ikea canteen on Tuesdays in search of some fun.

They arrive dressed a little nicer than usual, ready to talk about their virtues, their past lives and the future.

“I’m simple. I don’t smoke cigarettes or play mahjong,” said Xu Xiaoduo, 70, a twice-divorced former primary-school teacher who volunteers details about his pension (around $1,250 a month) and his dancing abilities (very good).

“But,” he added with a sigh, “I can’t find true love.” Others share his frustrations but downplay any yearning to find love. More than a few say they have lost hope. 

It should not be this hard.

There are more people in China who are 65 or older than there are in any other country. And Shanghai has more older adults than any other Chinese city.

Most of these residents stopped working long ago because China has one of the lowest retirement ages in the world, and many are either widowed or divorced. Everyone seems to be lonely, the children and grandchildren too busy with their own lives to visit.

The pool of older singles in China is only becoming bigger. Within the next three decades, the population of people who are 65 or older is expected to reach 400 million, according to the International Monetary Fund.

As people in China live longer and as ideas about love and marriage change, more people are looking for a second, or third, chance at love. To help fill the void, dating shows have popped up with titles such as “Not Too Late for Fate.” Online, there are chatrooms, livestreaming matchmakers and dating apps for the old and single.

But there is no substitute for getting together.

Every week in Shanghai, hundreds of older adults return to the same designated corners of public parks and, for some reason that no one was able to explain, one dining area at an Ikea in the upscale district of Xuhui, hopeful of meeting a future spouse.

The gatherings are social events — people bring karaoke machines and speakers to the park to dance and sing. They bring thermoses to Ikea to fill with free coffee, and sit around birch and plastic white tables swapping stories about their childhoods.

There are regulars, including Ma Guoying, 64, who has a warm smile and likes to wear bright colours and large, round glasses. She has spent a lot of time at Ikea and People’s Park over the past several months. Her friend Zhang Xiaolan, 66, has been coming for a decade.

Neither of them has had much luck finding a man. The older ones always seem to want younger women.

But it’s an activity that fills up a few hours of the day.

“If we stay at home 24 hours a day, our brains would deteriorate,” Ma said. Divorced and retired many years ago, she said it was lonely at home. Her daughter calls only occasionally, mostly just to check on her.

A leafy plot of land at the centre of Shanghai, People’s Park has a long history of serving as a meeting place, first for gamblers, then for student protesters and those hoping to practice their English. Today, it is better known for its “marriage market,” a place where parents return weekend after weekend with relentless optimism about finding a match for their unmarried and childless offspring.

They bring resumes with personal details such as the height and weight of their children, and they boast of attributes such as IQ level, university degrees and test scores.

It seemed only natural that the park could also become a meeting point for another kind of romantic hopeful: the retired and bored.

“Gradually, someone thought if the children could find a partner, so can the parents,” said Liu Qiyu, who was dressed in a blue velvet corduroy sweatsuit and accessorised with a gold watch, chains and a silk scarf. As older men and women began to crowd around in groups nearby, Liu explained that he wasn’t looking for someone himself.

“I came here once or twice, looking
for the other half, but I couldn’t find one,” he said.

Like the weekend park meet-ups, Tuesdays at Ikea tend to attract people between the ages of 60 and 80 looking for what has become known in China as “twilight love.”

For a few hours in the afternoon, the Swedish furniture retailer has the feel of a social club. The second floor of the store has some of the usual weekday traffic — shoppers who amble through the cafeteria’s metal stanchions picking out the famous meatballs, almond cakes and lingonberry juice. But many more have come for something other than Swedish fare, some bringing their own food and loitering from table to table, pulling chairs up to where friends and acquaintances are seated.

In the brightly lit bathroom, off to the side of the shop floor, women gather to gossip. One is putting on lipstick.

Online dating isn’t really a thing for the men and women here. They have smartphones, or at least they have the means to buy one, but most say they don’t want to search for a partner online.

“When it comes to buying things, I go online,” said Li Zhiming, 69, who had styled his black hair with gel and was wearing eyeliner and bell bottoms. “I don’t think online dating is reliable.”

Li said his wife had left him and their young son to go abroad in 1996, the early years of China’s reform and economic opening. He has been alone ever since. After retiring from a job as an engineer nine years ago, he started to plan his days with activities. He plays cards, dances to Latin music and can sing.

“I have my own apartment, a pension and a healthy body,” Li said.

He said he wanted to find a woman who was “young and beautiful.” In exchange, he promised to cook and take care of her. “I am lonely at home,” he said.

Zheng Yue, 70, chose to sit alone and wait for someone to come to her. Like many other women here, she did not want to give her full identity, instead providing the name she used on her public social media account.

Zheng, whose husband was a former police officer and died from an injury he had suffered years earlier, is looking for a man who is “knowledgeable, sensible, mature, stable, amiable and kind.” Someone, she added, whom she could “hold hands with for a lifetime.”

It takes a lot for women to come to these gatherings, she said. They tend to be more shy about finding a new partner.

“We are brave enough to come by ourselves and take the first step.”