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Single elders seek companionship
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A 65-year-old divorcee, Auntie Shen, recently married the 70-year-old man she has been living with for five years.
The delay in tying the knot revolved around issues of family inheritance. The partner’s two sons objected to their father’s remarriage over fears they would lose the rights to the two apartments on his death.
In 2014, Shanghai had about 4 million residents who were 60 years and older, and that figure is expected to reach 6 million by 2025. An estimated 1 million of them were single last year. Loneliness is a constant companion of many the widowed and divorced. Why not seek love in the autumn years?
The idea of the graying generation as lovebirds is sensitive, even taboo. It makes people uncomfortable and, in many instances, it makes stepchildren angry to think they might lose their inheritance rights if a parent remarries.
That’s what happened to Shen and her “boyfriend,” a widower and businessman who acquired the two downtown apartments before the two met. She nursed him through intestinal cancer, from which he has now recovered. But his children still looked on her as an interloper.
“We lived together for years like a family,” Shen said. “Most of our friends believed we were married. If they had known we were living out of wedlock, I would have felt ashamed. I have no apartment of my own, and I didn’t want to be driven out of this home one day.”
The pair finally married after her husband transferred the deeds of the two properties to his sons. Her residency status after her husband’s death is uncertain, she admitted.
It’s not that children don’t want their elderly, single parents to be happy. Many just prefer that the happiness not end up at the altar.
“I have no opposition if my father wants to find a ‘partner’ to be with him for the rest of his life because I know he is lonely,” said Tiara Jiang, a Shanghai woman whose mother died when she was a child. “But assets he accrued when my mother was still alive should not go to another woman. I couldn’t accept it if my father, who is 55 now, wanted to remarry.”
Less than 10 percent of seniors who find new partners late in life get married, according to Huang Yu, a matchmaker with the country’s biggest dating website jiayuan.com.
Among the majority is a 59-year-old divorcee surnamed Wang. She and her former husband built up a business from scratch, owned their own apartment and sent their son to study in the US. Their wealth caused a rift in their marriage. Some 10 years ago, she discovered her husband was having extramarital affairs.
“I felt like the sky was falling on me,” she said. “The only way to ease the pain in the end was to end the marriage.”
At a primary school reunion, Wang met an old classmate — a man who was also divorced. The two began seeing each other and eventually decided to live together six years ago. The man was in a poorer financial situation than Wang, but money wasn’t the issue.
“He takes good care of me and understands me,” Wang said. “For us, failure in marriage taught us how to cherish each other.”
The pair have no plans to marry. “It’s really unnecessary,” Wang said.
Indeed, many seniors who choose to cohabitate don’t worry about the complications of property and assets, Huang said. Some do get notarized statements of assets belonging to one partner or another, so there is no cloud over possession.
Public attitudes toward seniors remarrying are changing, she said. There is more tolerance nowadays. Even so, for many of older people, the marriage issue is secondary to the joy of finding someone to share the last years of their lives.
“Some seniors just want to find companionship and loving care,” Huang said. “A marriage certificate to them is just a piece of paper that makes no difference one way or another.”
Zhou Juemin, director of the Shanghai Matchmaking Association, said most seniors who find new partners late in life bring some nest egg savings to the relationship.
“They are realistic and have strong sense of self-protection,” she said. “They don’t necessarily have a burning desire to be tightly bonded together financially like youngsters in love.”
The association hosts a matchmaking event for middle-aged and older people once a month, and all 100-plus spaces are fully booked every time.
Zhou said some people come just to talk with others because they are more lonely than lovelorn.
Unlike most Western countries, people in China who live together for some years but never marry don’t have the legal rights of married people.
The Jing’an District Court, which operates China’s first special court for senior citizens, has had an increase of cases involving disputes of property inheritance arising from remarriages.
The disputes are usually between a surviving spouse and stepchildren, said Sun Yibin, deputy chief judge of the court.
He said women who cohabit without marriage aren’t protected under the law. If the partner dies, the survivor has no right to inheritance. If one partner gets seriously ill, there is also no legal responsibility of care.
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