[Photo by Liang Luwen/China Daily]

Some single women and men in China stay away from family dinners this Spring Festival to avoid marriage talk, Xu Lin reports.

While most people look forward to family reunions during Spring Festival in China, some young Chinese prefer to give the gatherings a miss in order to avoid any talk of marriage.

With the Chinese society undergoing rapid changes, late marriages and late parenthood are no longer uncommon, especially among residents of big cities.

Many single Chinese are also willing to wait for the right partner.

In 2010, the last national population census by the State Council and the National Bureau of Statistics, showed 36 percent of men and 21 percent of women in the 25-29 age group as unmarried. For those between ages 30 and 34, it was 12 percent and 5 percent respectively.

"I had promised my parents that I would get married last year," says Ma, 30, who runs a small company in Beijing. "But marriage relies on destiny, and you can't find it that easily."

Ma, who only gives her surname, says although she feels bad to have broken her promise, she is fed up with her parents' constant nagging. She didn't return to her hometown, a small city in Central China's Hunan province, for the festival this year, because in the past all her relatives would gather for meals during Spring Festival and discuss her unmarried status at every opportunity.

"They (her relatives) would tell me that my old childhood friend's kid is growing up. And, my mom complained that she would die discontent if I didn't get married. I wanted to flee such situations," Ma says.

In addition, there's peer pressure: Ma has two younger female cousins back home; one just gave birth to a second child, and the other was visiting with her boyfriend this year.

As an independent woman, Ma wants to marry someone who has a successful career and shares her values. She has been on unsuccessful blind dates with many men.

"Sometimes we are dazed by the many choices," Ma says of such dates. "And when you're still considering whether to be with a man, he may have found a girlfriend already."

But overall, she is cautious about marriage.