'One more drink and I'm a dog.' I said it again, surfacing from another hangover. The past six months have involved a lot of drinking. One day I drank at noon, again in the evening, and then around midnight. We even made a plan to meet for morning drinks with hulatang—a peppery breakfast soup—but none of us got up. Haha.
I don't like drinking now, and I especially don't like drinking to drown sorrow. It started because an old friend of more than twenty years has been going through a divorce for the past six months. A few days ago it was finally settled: a ten-year marriage over. I was best man at that wedding—the first time I'd ever been one. I still remember the two of them laughing together.
What makes it stranger is that on the day they went to get the certificate, my cousin went to the same place to get his marriage certificate. Two people, same day, same place, heading in opposite directions. I felt a weird kind of black comedy hanging between the two events.
The day before yesterday, a childhood friend messaged me to invite me to his wedding. It's his second marriage—maybe there will be a third, haha. At his first wedding he wasn't even sixteen. I was in my second year of high school and asked for time off to go. A few years after the wedding, his village was demolished and the compensation came through; they had three children. Now, apparently, a fourth is on the way...
Then there's my good older brother, a success in the conventional sense, financially free early. At thirty he chose to put everything down and embrace life again. And then there's me—dozens of intimate relationships, big and small...
I'm writing this because of two things. First, recent experiences with love and marriage have stirred it up, along with an earlier piece I wrote, 'Would You Marry Yourself?', and the thoughts that came after I got married last year and lived more than a year of married life. Second, by chance I saw your Weibo post, roughly asking: have you found what you wanted, and have you gotten married?
I'm not standing on some moral high ground, judging myself or anyone else, rattling on like a machine. I just don't think we should start being afraid because we've seen too many of these stories—start treating love as a joke and marriage as child's play, and stop daring to move forward. Everyone has the right to start over, and the right to live the life they want. If every relationship could end well, the world would certainly be better. But life is life—usually a mess of small, irritating things.
In 'Becoming Me' I explained the deadlock I kept hitting in intimate relationships: I was always looking for someone to save me. As soon as the other person made me feel unsafe, I instinctively looked for the next exit. Not because I didn't care, but because at that time I simply couldn't hold that insecurity. My inside was too empty, I couldn't fill it myself, so I kept wanting someone else to fill it.
We were once only a ceremony and a piece of paper away. Sometimes I think about it: a marriage certificate or a divorce certificate is, in the end, just paper. The main function of a marriage certificate is to make you eligible for a divorce certificate; the main benefit of a divorce certificate is that you need it when you marry again. As for love and life, they have nothing to do with those two pieces of paper.
After we separated, I did a lot of wild things. At one point I decided I had no perseverance, no ability to see anything through, so I set myself a challenge: cycle from Luoyang to Kaifeng, more than 200 kilometers.
After seeing each other one last time, in a period of extreme depression, I hurt myself. A few days later I went to Song Mountain and took back the promise I had made the first time I climbed it.
Time really is a devil. Even something that needed more than a dozen stitches, something I thought would stay with me for life—it can erase all of it. Even the scar grew back smooth.
After that I spent a long time alone. I read, wrote, worked, lived, and slowly put myself back together. But the physical symptoms of depression back then—the emotional explosions at any moment, the sudden storming off, the crying anywhere and anytime—even now, remembering it makes me feel suffocated. In that relationship I did do some things wrong and made some wrong choices. But if I still had to argue about right and wrong now, I really would not have let myself off the hook. Looking from today, separating at the wrong time was maybe the best choice.
You've been reading what I write, so this is my reply. But the people in memory are no longer the people now; the people we once were have stayed in the past. Like that scar, grown back smooth. If you ask me now whether I regret it—maybe what I regret most is that I should have at least kept one photo. Haha.
I think two people being together starts with each of them living whole, and then, on that foundation, loving another person. Not holding up your own emptiness and looking for someone to fill it, and certainly not pressing all your weight onto another person.
Two people will not always move at the same pace—the faster one waits a little, the slower one catches up; when things are hard, one person carries a bit more, and when things are good, you walk forward together. Love is not a question with a standard answer. It is just two real people keeping each other company in real life. Of course, if you walk faster and don't want to wait, that is also a personal right. Life is lived for yourself—as long as you give it a stable meaning.
Now, after all that pulling, madness, and rebuilding, I no longer try to define what a perfect intimate relationship is. All the obsession, resistance, and so-called 'merging into one' turn out to be an illusion. We do not need to seek salvation in each other, and we do not need to give up our respective right to pursue happiness. Being at peace with ourselves and whole in ourselves may be the best explanation we can give to the past.
After writing this, I plan to set an alarm for five tomorrow morning. This time I'll get up and go make up for the hulatang and morning drinks I missed last time. Haha.