Women chase after millionaires, but trip over own lack of social skills

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a husband. In China today, free-spending ladies are happy to plow their money into schools that help them meet and marry their own fantasy Mr Darcys.

After a 30,000-person blind date extravaganza held in Shanghai late last month, a training agency purporting to coach women to "find a dream husband within 90 days" hit the headlines, greeted by cheers and jeers alike.

Students pay at least 2,800 yuan ($456) daily for the course. A client from Hangzhou has spent 100,000 yuan ($16, 290) on lectures to date, Shanghai Evening Post reported.

Training facilities have been sprouting over the years that offer unmarried sisters an emotional and technical leg-up.

In July 2012, a workshop named "how to marry a multi-millionaire" kicked off in Southwest China's Chengdu city. Patrons put in 10,800 yuan ($1, 760) for a one-month, 40-period session on deciphering what it takes to be the wife of an upper crust guy.

A mounting tide of gold diggers is proving a gold mine for the canny. The curriculum follows sequentially and progressively into meeting, dating, and rendezvousing with the targeted rich fellow, the ground rule being turning a wild fling into a wedding ring.

Each step features down-to-earth, easy-to-follow, pulling-no-punches cases, like ascertaining the hobbies and usual haunts of the affluent so as to forge an ecstatic encounter.

It's already outmoded for chicks to stake out a golf course, poised to hit on and hopefully hit it off with a random dude.

Nowadays, a girl may drive her own mini car, hit a limousine on purpose, and make a delicately pitiful face to the well-heeled car owner, in the hope he'll fall head over heels by the benign, beguiling babe before him. And a breezy romance thus ensues.

Underneath the course guidelines, love is scientifically calibrated to see on whom the chemistry works, where to sit radiantly in a candlelight dinner, when to nudge nudge or wink wink, and how to play hard-to-get but not too hard. It is like a fisherwoman trying to snag a catch in a sea of fat cats.

Such playbooks fly in the face of pure love, and many a calculation bankrupts a relationship.

However, a dilemma is facing domestic youths of marriageable age, especially first-tier-city dwellers. For one thing, their mind-set is steeped in Western nuptial norms that reject the ideas of arranged marriage.

But their tragic lack of skills pertaining to courtship and communication make them slow to spot, sense, and seize soulmates.

There are legions of unattached women with heart open for loves, yet they cannot make it by themselves, and they just sit waiting for a man with the whole package to come to propose, noted Wu Di, a Shanghai-based certified relationship guru, in her blog.

Myriad youngsters merely notice to scrub up and spruce up themselves quite nicely for a speed date, yet are clueless of how to spice things up via a killer pick-up line, reading mixed signals, busting out the A material, and not letting figures do the talking.

Therefore, they deserve to hone their social skills in order to find a better half. Nevertheless, they don't have broader leeway to sink or swim in surging waters of free love.

Perhaps they do need help from tutors, like some who set up erotically charged dancing classes helping trainees to enhance body language ready for a romantic date.

But as Lian Yue, one of China's most beloved agony uncles, once said, "Love is one kind of knowledge that cannot be acquired and learned."

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