SCMP Monday, August 27, 2001

25-year-olds play the dating agency game
SUSAN SCHWARTZ and PATSY MOY
More women are hiring dating services - and clients as young as 25 have been signing up in recent years, counsellors say.
Grace Wu Lai-ming, administrator for the dating service Dinner for Six, said the number of divorced women using their services had tripled in the past two years.
"Six to 10 years ago, most of the women we would see used to be in their mid-30s to 50s," Ms Wu said. "Single women are holding back from marriage, they are more demanding and some look for soul mates and not necessarily a marriage partner. More people are getting divorced because women are financially independent with a higher education and society is more receptive to divorce."
Fortunate Marriage Service counsellor Siu Siu-man said 70 per cent of her clients were women, compared to about 30 per cent in the mid-90s. Ms Siu said the rise could be attributed to the increasing tendency for Hong Kong men to search for wives on the mainland.
She said most of her clients were professionals aged over 30 but were "very choosy."
"Men want well-educated, pretty young women, and women want capable and well-off men. Both sides are choosy in selecting their partners." She added that lower-income men often married mainland women who were more "willing to compromise" than Hong Kong women.