For Shanghai’s lonely and retired, love is elusive. Divorced or widowed residents gather in a dating corner in People’s Park every weekend looking for a chat. They mill about an Ikea canteen on Tuesdays in search of some fun.

They arrive dressed a little nicer than usual, ready to talk about their virtues, their past lives and the future.

“I’m simple. I don’t smoke cigarettes or play mahjong,” said Xu Xiaoduo, 70, a twice-divorced former primary-school teacher who volunteers details about his pension (around $1,250 a month) and his dancing abilities (very good).

“But,” he added with a sigh, “I can’t find true love.” Others share his frustrations but downplay any yearning to find love. More than a few say they have lost hope.

It should not be this hard. There are more people in China who are 65 or older than there are in any other country. And Shanghai has more older adults than any other Chinese city. Most of these residents stopped working long ago because China has one of the lowest retirement ages in the world, and many are either widowed or divorced. Everyone seems to be lonely, the children and grandchildren too busy with their own lives to visit.

The pool of older singles in China is only becoming bigger. Within the next three decades, the population of people who are 65 or older is expected to reach 400 million, according to the IMF.

As people in China live longer and as ideas about love and marriage change, more people are looking for a second, or third, chance at love. To help fill the void, dating shows have popped up with titles such as “Not Too Late for Fate.” Online, there are chatrooms, livestreaming matchmakers and dating apps for the old and single.

But there is no substitute for getting together.

Every week in Shanghai, hundreds of older adults return to the same designated corners of public parks and, for some reason that no one was able to explain, one dining area at an Ikea in the upscale district of Xuhui, hopeful of meeting a future spouse.

The gatherings are social events — people bring karaoke machines and speakers to the park to dance and sing. They bring thermoses to Ikea to fill with free coffee, and sit around birch and plastic white tables swapping stories about their childhoods.

There are regulars, including Ma Guoying, 64, who has a warm smile and likes to wear bright colours and large, round glasses. She has spent a lot of time at Ikea and People’s Park over the past several months. Her friend Zhang Xiaolan, 66, has been coming for a decade.

Neither of them has had much luck finding a man. The older ones always seem to want younger women.

But it’s an activity that fills up a few hours of the day.

“If we stay at home 24 hours a day, our brains would deteriorate,” Ma said. Divorced and retired many years ago, she said it was lonely at home. Her daughter calls only occasionally, mostly just to check on her.

A leafy plot of land at the centre of Shanghai, People’s Park has a long history of serving as a meeting place, first for gamblers, then for student protesters and those hoping to practice their English. Today, it is better known for its “marriage market”, a place where parents return weekend after weekend with relentless optimism about finding a match for their unmarried and childless offspring. They bring resumes with personal details such as the height and weight of their children.

It seemed only natural that the park could also become a meeting point for another kind of romantic hopeful: the retired and bored. “Gradually, someone thought if the children could find a partner, so can the parents,” said Liu Qiyu, who was dressed in a blue velvet corduroy sweatsuit and accessorised with a gold watch, chains and a silk scarf.