Both sides would report to the "auntie". If one party said "yes" and the other "no", the one who said no would be grilled: "What don't you like about her? I don't see anything wrong? You two look perfect together."

If you turned down two or three dates, you would risk being an outcast. The matchmaker would label you as "too picky" and delete you from her database. And if she happened to be your colleague, you might be bumped from your next promotion.

Chinese are extremely status-conscious when it comes to dating and marriage.

It only happens in fairy tales that a poor boy meets a rich girl and they

get to live happily ever after. Wang Xizeng / For China Daily

During this weird tango of three, there was room for love, but not necessarily prominent. Still it was an improvement on the era of arranged marriages, when a man and a woman could not even meet before tying the knot, or in China's case, unveiling the head scarf of the bride. The result was numerous tragedies.

To understand how social hierarchy figures in traditional Chinese marriages, you need look no further than classic love stories. In The Butterfly Lovers, Liang Shanbo is a poor scholar, while the woman, Zhu Yingtai, is from a rich family. They fall in love, but are torn apart - only to reunite in death and as phantasms of butterflies. In Marriage Between Fairy and Man, a fairy maiden literally falls into the lap of a poor farmer. They start a family, but eventually she has to return to her furious mother.

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