“Women are rejecting marriage in Asia,” you report in your main leader that smacks of summer vacations (“Asia’s Lonely Hearts,” August 20, 2011). On the one hand, Asian women enjoy ever-greater financial freedom brought by economic development. On the other, the traditional burden of family life is the greatest in Asia. So, many Asian women are skipping marriage altogether. None of this is particularly surprising, though. Asia has come late to industrialization and urbanization that accompanies it. What took Britain at least two hundred years, or eight generations, and what took America about a half of that time, will take only a quarter of it in much of Asia. Change is ever swifter. And the amount of time to adjust to it is ever shorter. The vaunted Asian values will go through the tumult of industrialization and urbanization in two generations only. Not surprisingly, women are the main beneficiaries of the departure from the idiocy of village life. And marriage has been at its core since the advent of agriculture.