Over the years as I came across these marriage markets, I noticed a trend in the ads: the men tended to be in their mid-twenties, without a college education. The women advertised tended to be older and better educated. This is not just because China’s legal age for marriage — again, twenty for women, twenty-two for men — creates a built-in expectation that men should seek younger (and presumably less established) mates. It is also of a piece with China’s deep-seated hypergamous culture, where women marry up and men marry down.
