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Love binds couples on different paths
Striking a balance between job and life can bring challenges to a woman"s career. IMAGINECHINA
BOTH Wang Juan, 23, and her boyfriend work with numbers. The insurance asset management adviser tracks market charts to help her clients maximize their profits. Her boyfriend, a graduate student at Beijing Jiaotong University, analyzes computer data to get an "A" from his tutor.
Such are the lives of many young Chinese couples who have chosen different paths upon graduating from university, with women taking the initial role of breadwinners. Love still binds them, but financial and social pressures threaten to tear them apart.
Gu Leilei started working in a state-owned company three years ago when her boyfriend, Liu Haitao, entered grad school. At that time, she remembers paying most of the bills.
"I once got frustrated when he only bought me a strawberry cake on my birthday," said Gu, 26. "I thought he would also give me a necklace and take me to the aquarium, as he had promised."
Gu also remembers feeling pressure from family and friends. They encouraged her to find an established man with a house or a car, but had different ideas.
"Love outweighs material pursuits for me. I have absolute confidence in his getting a high-paying job soon," she said.
As for Liu, he refuses to take her love for granted and tries his best to "fulfill his assumed role as a man". He works part-time and sometimes takes Gu to film showings on campus. "It is good for my self-respect and dignity as a man," said Liu. The couple plans to marry in April.
Social pressures
However, others have seen their love fade with the social gap that appears when the woman goes to work. Fang Ye, who works for a German company in Shanghai, recently broke up with her boyfriend.
"He"s naive," the 25-year-old said. "When I complained about trouble in my office, he didn"t seem to understand at all. I had to face it alone."
Fang explained that, once she went to work, they had different circles of friends and little time to spend together. "My apartment is far away from his university, and sometimes when I got back from work tired, he was still reading in the library."
Short-term sacrifice?
Common wisdom suggests that this financial and social imbalance is only short-term. Upon finishing grad school, the man should be able to land a good job. But recent surveys suggest that a higher degree won"t necessarily ensure a higher salary.
According to a 2006-2007 income survey released by ChinaHR Corporation, people with higher degrees do earn better pay, but the yearly income of those with a master"s degree is going down.
Le Yue, 26, who now works for an overseas study agency, has had difficulty finding a job with a salary close to his girlfriend"s. She earns more than 6,000 yuan at an entertainment magazine. But Le insists that his earning less doesn"t make them less content as a couple.
"Even though I might not be on the same starting line with her, I can work hard to catch up," he says. "And who earns more doesn"t mean too much to me as long as we feel happy."
Zhang Xiaoyuan, vice-director of the communication department of All China"s Women Federation says that young people should be prepared to enter this kind of world.
"In the old social conventions, men are expected to earn money and support the family. However, women are economically independent now. Their roles within the family can be flexible, according to the needs and situation.
"In this phase, the girlfriends or wives take on more responsibility. However, when the women get pregnant, the husbands becomes the main breadwinner."
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生词：
asset 资产
aquarium 水族馆
bind 约束
bottleneck 瓶颈
breadwinner 养家活口的人
content 满足
Federation 联合会
naive 天真的
outweigh 在重量(或价值等)上超过
pregnancy 怀孕
strenuously 奋发地, 费力地
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