To satisfy all the requirements I list above, I think that a guy will have to fall beyond one standard deviation from the mean (to the right of 1σ). What does that mean? That means that this guy is among the
top 16% (no need to argue with me with the exactness of the percentage; my argument makes sense for, say, 30% too) of the population.
Surely, it's a woman's freedom to set whatever requirements she wants for her spouse. After all, it's someone who's supposed to be with her for the rest of her life, how can she make compromise?
Yes, I agree. However, having no room to compromise doesn't mean that the requirements are
realistic. Marriage is a one-to-one relationship; how can the top 16% be enough for all the Hong Kong women? This is also true vice versa; it'd be unrealistic for all men to look for women in the top 16% (be it beauty, education, wisdom, kindness, you name it).
Actually, what really annoys me isn't the lovableness of normal people; after all, this is mostly a personal issue. The thing that does annoys me is the view that
people who're normal don't deserve the same respect that significant people receive.
In the "
港男.講女" Sunday Report program, one Hong Kong girl actually said this
"Honestly speaking, if you're poor, people will look down on you."
This may be the fact, but she said it in a way that it's
okay to hold such a attitude.
Wow, do you know how many poor people there're in this world? According to the standard of living in Hong Kong and the
Global Rich List, she'd probably have to look down on at least 85% of the people in the world. How many is 85%? Not that many, just around
5.7 billion. This kind of attitude is just plain crazy.
To my mind, a person deserves respect as long as s/he
I do understand why people generally don't like living in a poor neighborhood: not because the people there are poor but the fact that poor people are usually inconsiderate. For example, people in ghetto areas often have dogs that bark throughout the night and make it difficult for their neighbors to fall asleep. Those people deserve to not be respected but they're not the normal people I'm talking about in this post.
In one episode of a BBC tourism program that I watched some years ago, they visited a little store in Italy that sells all kind of fruit jams. After the store owner (an old man) enthusiastically showed the program host the manufacturing process of his jams, the host said to him with admiration
"I can tell that you're a man who loves what you do."
"Yes, I do." Said the owner with a grateful smile on his face.
That old store owner may not make that much money since he only sells the jams in the small town he lives in. He may not have any ambition to be
Knott's Berry Farm. He may not even have a bachelor's degree. He's probably just an insignificant old man that only the residents in his local town know had BBC not visited him.
Given all that, can you think of any reason why he doesn't deserve respect that significant people like Walter Knott (the founder of Knott's Berry Farm) receive?
We do need significant and powerful people like President Obama in this world. Nevertheless, it's unrealistic and unfair to ask everyone to be rich and significant. A normal watchmaker, a regular computer technician like
Peter and a peaceful old man selling james in his little town are just as respectable as any normal person out there.