Recently I got to know someone who’d been divorced, remarried, and now has a child together with his new wife.
He walked me through his remarriage experience, and I found it genuinely instructive.
One: Divorce is a weak point. So if you want to date and get married, going out and finding someone yourself is easier than waiting to be introduced.
He’s an only child from the city — divorced, no kids, highly educated, stable job, income over 300,000 yuan a year. His parents have two properties, he owns two more himself, plus a car worth over 500,000. With credentials like that, people were constantly offering to set him up.
Some women he’d turn down without even agreeing to meet. When introduced to a divorced woman with children, he’d hear that much and say: “Not suitable.”
The matchmaker would sometimes push back: “This woman has a good income — she can support her child on her own. They won’t be a burden to you.”
His thinking went like this: Sure, she can support the kid alone. But once you’re married and pooling resources, the math changes. One person buys the child a one-million apartment; two people together, you’d end up buying a two-million apartment. Once married, money flows together no matter what.
He turned them all down, politely.
Then he started using dating apps himself. He met quite a few women — appealing profiles, good conversations, attractive in person. After dating for a while, he’d find out they’d been married before and had children.
And he naturally noticed something: these women tended to have real advantages. They were more grounded, less sensitive and demanding than women who’d never been through marriage and childbirth. Having experienced pregnancy, they also had far less dread about having children again.
Of course, some told him outright: “I don’t want more children.”
Then it would just stay casual. No children, no point in marriage.
His current wife is also a divorced woman — someone he met on a dating site. By the time he’d been with her long enough to naturally learn she had a child, feelings had already taken hold. His thinking had shifted to: “It’s just money, isn’t it? Isn’t that what men earn it for — to spend on their women?”
Both approaches — being introduced versus finding someone yourself — have their merits.
With an introduction, everything is laid out upfront. You know the full picture, and the chance of being deceived is low. When you meet someone on your own, nobody reveals everything at first, so you have to filter as you go. But introductions jump straight to comparing credentials — feelings rarely get a chance to develop. When you find someone yourself, you actually fall for them first.
Two: Once you’re past thirty, you must know how to cook, handle household chores, and not resent domestic life.
He hadn’t initially thought much about the importance of cooking. He’s capable himself — having studied in the US and worked in the UK and several cities in China, complete self-sufficiency was never a question. Housework didn’t feel hard to him, and he didn’t see it as a potential issue.
His original thinking: if his partner didn’t enjoy housework, he could handle it himself, or they could hire someone. His friends had told him: “My wife only learned to do housework after we got married — it’s easy to pick up.”
But gradually, he came to understand what housework really represents — a person’s fundamental attitude toward domestic life.
He once dated a woman who was 28 at the time, about eight years younger than him. Master’s degree, roughly 10,000 yuan a month, renting in the city at 2,000 yuan a month, no cooking, no cleaning — takeout and a part-time housekeeper covered everything.
Throughout their relationship, she repeatedly made her position clear: she wouldn’t have children, household duties would be split equally going forward, and naturally each party could outsource their share to a cleaner or nanny.
He tried reasoning with her: “If you’re not having children and not doing housework, what exactly is your contribution to the marriage? Just the physical relationship?”
And don’t give me ‘you earn the money, I’ll stay beautiful.’ I can stay productive until sixty, maybe sixty-five. Can you stay beautiful until sixty?
It turned into a fight. She declared that she couldn’t allow marriage to lower her quality of life.
He was genuinely puzzled at first — joining with him could only raise her quality of life, since he earned far more than she did.
Then it clicked: to her, doing housework was what lowered her quality of life.
He thought it through honestly: could he come home after a full day’s work and still handle all the housework, waiting on a princess? First, he couldn’t sustain that. Second, she wasn’t even much of a princess to begin with.
They broke up.
He shared plenty of other interesting stories — I’ll write about those another time.