An independent apartment has become one of the preconditions for marriage, with about 57 percent of single women saying it's a requirement, according to a survey jointly conducted by dating website Jiayuan.com and China's biggest real estate broker Lianjia. That's 16 percentage points higher than the number of single men who hold the same view, according to the survey. For women who are the only child of their family, the figure jumped to 68 percent. Some 69 percent of single women said their ideal husband-to-be would own an apartment prior to marriage, while only about 10 percent said they would be willing to live in a rental flat after getting married, an option unacceptable to more than half the female participants in the survey due to a perceived lack of security. Single women tended to marry men who had property, and 14 percent of them said they would also require their future husbands to write their names on the property ownership certificate. Some 48 percent of single women agreed it was acceptable for a newly married couple to live in a flat provided by the wife, compared with a figure of 18 percent among male respondents, many of whom said they did not want to feel dependent on their partner. According to the survey, some 67 percent of couples broke up because they could not afford an apartment in Zhenzhou, the capital of Henan province, followed by Shanghai, with 64 percent, and Tianjin, with 63 percent. More than half of the singles surveyed hoped they could have a three-bedroom apartment of 90-120 square meters as a wedding flat, but smaller flats with areas between 60-90 square meters were their actual selection because of housing prices, according to Lianjia. Zhang Jiarui, an expert with Jiayuan.com, said similar values, emotional attraction and harmonious personalities should be more important factors for a marriage.
