How We Threw Love Away

Sometimes, the affinity between two people—one meeting is enough. Because he is the lover from your past life.

—The Bible

Yang Jiang is gone. The living specimen of an extraordinary love story is gone. News media and self-media outlets are flooded with the news of her passing. This is because the love between Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang was both plain and stunning, envied by countless people.

Heaven created humans divided into male and female, and then placed love between them. The preciousness of love surpasses everything. Even the Buddha, who advocated cutting off love and desire, sighed: "No desire is greater than sexual desire; desire rooted in form has nothing beyond it. Were there a second such desire, no one in the world could practice the Way" (from *The Sutra of Forty-two Sections*).

From this sigh of the Buddha, I venture to guess that the reason the Buddha left home had something to do with his failure to encounter a like-minded partner. Had such a partner been there, the Buddha would not have shaved his head and become a śramaṇa. Because the Buddha himself acknowledged that "were there a second such desire, no one in the world could practice the Way"—and this statement includes himself.

Sometimes we live our lives, and as we go on, we grow weary. Husbands and wives live together with no passion; the reason they still stick together is more out of a sense of duty and familial affection. We have also grown accustomed to believing that love eventually fades, and that familial affection is what truly sustains a marital relationship. In this world, couples dissatisfied with their marriage often comfort themselves with this kind of rhetoric.

This is nothing but self-deception. Love matters. A life without love is a lonely and exhausting journey; a marriage without love is a cage that destroys both partners' lives.

So what is love? Love is built on mutual liking, appreciation, and recognition. Ideal love, as Havelock Ellis put it, is established between two like-minded people. If spouses sneer at, or even viciously attack, the most core aspects of each other's inner world—such as their outlook on life, values, and life ideals—then such a couple living together is like living in purgatory, tormented for a lifetime. Such a marriage would be better dissolved sooner rather than painfully maintained, so that both partners can find ideal companions and not waste their lives.

In an age where material desire runs rampant, secular marriage is gradually turning into disguised sexual transaction. A man who wants to marry a woman must pay a high material price; after marriage, he must keep striving to satisfy her various material needs, whether or not that striving is what he enjoys. Men, driven by vanity, become restless and frivolous.

In China, where the gender ratio is severely imbalanced, pure love is becoming increasingly rare. The communities around us are justifying, normalizing, and ritualizing the material exchange inherent in marriage. As humans prone to conformity, most of us foolishly believe that since everyone else does it, we should too. So in China, this face-conscious nation, bride prices keep climbing, and material demands after marriage never cease. Such marriages are so tedious that eventually even sexual relations disappear.

Love was thrown away by our own foolish desires. We traded this priceless treasure for material comfort, believing we had won at life. Who knows how many people, on sudden reflection, still remember the days when they walked hand in hand with their lovers by the riverbank, head over heels in love. The divorce rate in modern society is so high that it is hard to believe pure love still exists.

The saddest life of all is one with no pursuits beyond material things. Therefore, when choosing a partner, the rational approach is to choose someone who has an interest in life itself. In China, such people have mostly been eliminated by our family, school, and social education. We live in a fiercely competitive atmosphere, with no pursuit beyond winning the competition.

As parents, we educate our children to win in competition, and when making life choices for them, we consider only schooling, better ways to make money, and attaining a so-called respectable life. When we ourselves can control our own lives, we desperately make and save money, sacrificing today for tomorrow, sacrificing spiritual joy for material comfort. Our love has become nothing more than rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, tea, houses, cars, and numbers in bank accounts. Few people consider that stepping back may lead to a more perfect life.

Among living beings on this planet, creatures as foolish as humans are rarely found.