Can't You Take Things Seriously?

It’s Qixi again, so as a single virgin I get asked that annoying question a lot. The version I hear most goes something like this:

“Oh come on, why haven’t you found someone yet~ Don’t give me that ’nobody fits’ stuff. Love is a skill, you get good by practicing. Just pick someone at random for now… it’s not like you’re definitely marrying her in the end, right? Get some practice in first. No need to take it so seriously at the start.”

Right. This is a fast-food society, so fast that everyone wants to go from first pitch to home plate by tomorrow. Once we could read an article all the way through and then write down our thoughts; now we just scroll fast and mash the keyboard with “tl;dr.” Long blog posts that everyone wrote gave way to mindless reposts of 140-character updates. Original work used to contend from a hundred schools; now marketing bots are everywhere. All of it announces a new era: an era of fast food, an era of entertainment. People aren’t reserved anymore — they talk about sex acts and sex organs with barefaced relish, and nothing is off-limits for twisting and joking about. We gave it a philosophical-sounding name: tsukkomi (even though that’s not really what it means). And if anyone takes a joke seriously, they get one line, every time.

“Hey hey, you take it seriously, you lose."

So today I actually lay in bed thinking for almost half an hour. Guess I really did lose.

Back to the earlier topic. On the subject of feelings, I’m actually a bit old-fashioned. I think romance should be refined out of friendship — the two people go from meeting to knowing to loving. Love at first sight with some physical contact right off the bat is shoujo manga, not reality. If two people confess without even knowing each other, what is that progression… animals mating?

And stepping back: if I really did “find someone at random to date for now,” the premise is that I neither understand nor like the other person. So say I get the relationship experience I wanted, somewhere down the line — what do I do about the person I’m with? Dump her? Who counts the damage done to her? Life throws a lot of choices at you, and romance is one of them. The point of a choice isn’t one-sided gain, it’s…

The moment you choose someone as your partner, you also take on the corresponding responsibility

I can’t help thinking back to childhood, to the “other people’s kids” stories my father always told me…

“Look at so-and-so’s kid. He tells his dad every day, ‘Don’t worry, Dad, I’ll definitely place in the top ten on this exam.’ So what if he never actually made top ten? His dad still heard the determination. Why can’t you have determination like that?”

Hey, you know my study ability and study habits, combined with my study motivation — there was no chance of me guaranteeing any particular rank. If I made that promise, I’d have to deliver. But… honestly, I couldn’t. Making a promise you can’t keep — what is that? Fraud?

So I kept my mouth shut about my father’s request. All the way through college I never once guaranteed him “I’ll definitely place within rank XXX,” because I couldn’t do it, or at least couldn’t be sure I could. That’s when I noticed I’m extremely careful about making promises. Even a verbal yes. I’ve always felt that if I agreed to something and I remember it, I should do it — and if I can’t do it, I shouldn’t agree.

This contract-like way of thinking probably gets called immature. But these days aren’t the streets full of mature people? Saying their rough edges got sanded off by society, sighing about life, and meanwhile still talking fake talk out of their mouths.

Lots of people say winning over a girl is easy — start by mindlessly complimenting her.

Yeah, I can’t do that. Because the same way I treat promises as gold, I think…

Love is the kind of thing that gets easier the more you say it, and cheaper-looking the more you show it off

Plenty of “love masters” have told me the ultimate weapon against women is sweet talk. No matter how aloof and elegant she is, nobody can resist a tidal wave of compliments and declarations of love. If your words aren’t working, you just haven’t hit the right spot in her heart.

I haven’t talked much with girls in love, and I’m not a woman myself. I just wonder whether the many women on the receiving end of sweet talk ever ask themselves one question: “If he can say that to you, can’t he say it to someone else?”

There’s a type of person I’ve come to really hate in real life: the guy who pops up out of nowhere and acts buddy-buddy with you. We barely overlap — why pretend we’re close? If he’s calling you “bro” every other sentence, that only makes me more annoyed. The guy who calls everyone bro doesn’t actually treat you as a bro. Same way, the person who says “I love you” every other sentence probably doesn’t actually love you that much.

Ah… after all that sighing, Qixi has nothing to do with me anyway. Thinking it over, this is basically me plinking at random strings… just talking about my views on romance. Fine, it fits the upcoming Qixi, I guess.

Honestly I don’t know much about romance either. What I said above, looking at it now, probably applies to all person-to-person relationships — not something unique to romance.

What counts as a friend, what counts as liking someone? I didn’t get it before. I might get it now. There are people I like — I just don’t know whether they accept me (shrug).

I tend to take a lot of things seriously, especially people I care about. Of course, when I find out the other person wasn’t taking me seriously, I’ll probably get angry first, then let it go. How many years have I been on my own now? As long as this world has things I love and want to chase, that’s enough to keep living.

Lots of people say taking it seriously means losing. To me that sounds more like an excuse to run away — you don’t want to understand, you refuse to understand, so you can only play the above-it-all with a joke. I watched the new Doraemon movie this afternoon and saw plenty of people shitposting about it with zero restraint. Was I the only one who came out quietly moved?

Fine. Sometimes we need a little seriousness — even in an era where almost nobody takes anything seriously.

Can’t you take things seriously?